


our particular devil

by SecretReyloTrash (BadOldWest)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: And Regular Cages, But Will Rey Be Cool With It?, Cock Cages, Dark, Dark Kylo Ren, Darksider Happy Ending, Deception, Deceptively Yes, Dirty Talk, Dramatic Wedding Interruptions, F/M, Fingering, Gothic Au, Gothic Murder Romance, Halloween 2020, Haunted Manor, Kind of that ‘Noli’ Ending Where Everyone is Happy With Their End of the Deal But Yikes, Loss of Virginity, Mentions of past abuse, Midcentury Reylo, Murder, No Pregnancy, Obsession, Pianist Rey, Piano Bench Smut, Possessive Kylo, Rebecca Inspired, Seduction, Seriously Kylo’s a Murderer, There’s a Cage Involved, Villain-Marrying-First, Villainfucking, Voyeurism, a murder most foul, mild stalking, things that go bump in the night - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:27:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 24,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26775877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BadOldWest/pseuds/SecretReyloTrash
Summary: She was a young woman mourning in an unfamiliar house.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 85
Kudos: 353





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> “We all of us have our particular devil who ruses us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end.”
> 
> Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca

There was an image of him she would always remember: because in the moment of it she felt such perfect love that she vowed she would never forget. 

Even when she wanted to. 

Her husband entered through the door behind her in what was, at least when it was in shadow, a honeymoon suite. She was taking off her sunglasses in the bedroom and glanced back to see him walk through the door. 

As a husband, in this beginning, that first slice: he was a pleasant amusement. Growling at her as he rolled her stocking down her legs, snapping the elastic of her garters before he unclips them, he always made her giggle. That nervy first night of marriage was long over. Now cast in sunlight, there were no more shivers of anticipation each time the door enclosed them in privacy, and somehow she had lost her trepidation to be alone in the room with this man. 

This time he did not carry  _ her _ through the threshold, but a hatbox in his hands. Her husband had taken her shopping through the fashionable streets of Paris. He held it in such a way as she had seen men in the Orchestra carry a case that held priceless musical instruments: with such care and consideration. 

Pianos couldn’t be carried. Wouldn’t fit in a car. Curse of the instrument, really. Maybe if she’d played flute she could have really run off with it.

He was puzzled at her own expression, which she had not managed to catch in the mirror on the wall to know why exactly it surprised him, a hand running through his hair. 

She never saw the look on her own face that must have inspired the confusion in him.

It was a small chivalry to carry it for her as if she needed to tell him where to set it down. Sweet. Simple. Hardly a grand gesture. Nothing compared to the rush of courtship: too much to even focus on all the ways he tried to spoil her. 

With her examination, he clearly didn’t know whether to be concerned or darkly amused. If she puzzled out her blossoming new impulses as a young wife or was stricken with the malady of sadness that clouded all connection running through them. If she’d flutter her hands like dove wings and coo for him to come over and take her to bed. 

Or if she’d simply weep in the hotel suite.

She didn’t feel much inclination one way or the other at that moment. 

It stopped time for her. The soft whisper of clock hands silenced forever. Her lungs couldn’t release the air they held. The sun was stuck at the center of the sky like a beetle on a cork board with a pin stabbed neatly through the shell. It was something begun that would never end now. 

It could never be forgotten. She loved this man so perfectly that in that moment she thought she would die from it. 

* * *

Rey’s gait was never as appropriately clipped as it was on that day; stepping from the car out into the thunderous rain engulfing Kylo Ren’s manor. 

She moved with the careful precision of a chess piece hopping from space to space, skimming across the board’s squares in a perfunctory way to reach her acquired position. That was the house that loomed up ahead and would have frightened her if it was not her only shelter. She clung to her small, light suitcase and hoped the wind wouldn’t blow her away before she ever reached the house. 

An invitation over telephone is a nebulous thing. It is issued, and then dissolves like vapor. It is impossible to call upon for evidence of the reason being here. Like air. But when she’d received the phone call from her sad little room in London asking her to stay with him, his voice warm and enticing, she had little other option outside of teaching piano to posh little children.

Stone columns that were bared like white fangs waited for her at the end of the path. 

She shivered and looked at once back at the cab she had emerged from, which was already dashing away through the rain. Morbidly, Rey wondered to herself what would happen if this was in fact the wrong house, another snarl in her string of horrifically bad luck on this twenty-second year of her life. Trying to briefly imagine whatever she would do next if this was just another thing gone terribly wrong. 

This journey would require all of her bravery. 

But the door swung open as soon as she knocked, and her name was spoken aloud in recognition by the housekeeper, all of it almost happening too quickly for her to feel herself firmly arrived at the manor. 

Her case was taken from her hand by a valet and a blanket was produced to wrap around her soaked, shaking shoulders before she felt like she drew her first proper breath inside of the house. 

There was little to know of what to expect from her new position here: what she was hired to do. She had gone to the library back in London to seek out any information she could find on the old estate, a looming, architectural marvel, and quite an ugly one at that. It demanded to be looked at, twisted and jagged thing, like a pyre of flame or a wounded animal. 

Though she supposed she wouldn’t need to know that much of the carved stone outside to be able to clean the insides. She had asked around in offices of employment what might occupy a maid—hired as a favor with no experience—before she left London, but those offices had no patience for a woman with work who had no idea how to do it. She hoped there would be more patience here: or feared if the favor only extended as far as she could reach up to meet it. 

His housekeeper introduced herself as a Mrs. Timker. Wisps of graying blonde hair covered her brow, falling like a cloud of dust. Otherwise she was very orderly-looking. 

It was the housekeeper who had given her the blanket. She clutched it now as the old woman greeted her. It was nice to have someone waiting with a blanket when she came in from the rain. Like she is expected. Welcome. 

“If you’d just follow me. He’s quite insistent on seeing you before you get settled in.”

Rey tightened her fingers around the edges of the blanket surrounding her.

“Excuse me?”

The housekeeper was already motioning for Rey to follow her down the hall. 

“Kylo Ren wants you to see him first before you’re shown to your rooms,” the housekeeper clarified. It wasn’t mean. But it was what absolutely had to be done. 

Rey swallowed and clutched the blanket tighter around herself. 

She had not seen Kylo Ren, her generous benefactor to whom she owed her thanks, since her parent’s funeral. 

It was so clear in her memory. She thought she was perhaps wicked back then because she could not cry. And perhaps the coldness of the other mourners regarding her was because of that. A strange girl, burying two parents and now alone in the world, who could not weep. 

But then Kylo Ren stood before her in the proceeding line to give his condolences. Her friend, her admirer, at his own insistence. He held her entirely without touching her, like a shadow, and merely kissed the back of her hand. His expression was kind, like seeing her made him happy, and that happiness warmed her as well on that cold day where she buried her family.

The hallway was too dark to take in her surroundings as she followed the housekeeper to see him. A warmth flowed from the doorway at the end: Rey was nearly desperate for the fire she could sense roaring inside. Her need for warmth outweighed her social graces, she entered the room realizing she had not thought of a single word she would say when she first saw him. 

Then she lifted her eyes from the flames and saw the picture of the master of the house in their shadow. 

She started with:

_ “He’s beautiful.” _

And she meant it to praise the elegant hound resting his head on his master’s knee. 

She was greeted with a soft smile for her misstep from the Lord of the Manor. 

Kylo Ren patted the dog she had complimented grandly, like the neck of a prized racehorse. 

“Pilot. My closest companion in this lonely house. Until your highly anticipated arrival, Miss Niima. Welcome.”

This was new to Rey to hear;  _ companion.  _ It sounded much nicer than a silly little maid allowed to dust his portraits out of charity. 

A series of impoliteness seemed to act as a test that increased in intensity over a span of a few moments. She stood on the rug in front of him with her hands folded. Even with her cold, wet things cling to her skin as she had not been permitted to change out of them first. 

He did not offer a chair so she did not take one. 

He seemed intrigued by her politeness in the face of these small, incremental indiscretions, so trained into her was the instinct to behave so that she would stand all night if she had to, bearing all discomfort. 

She wanted to laugh back at him for his amusement. A chill and some sore feet. This was nothing.

“Thank you for your generosity.”

Again, a wryness twisted his features, and he grinned into his hand and scratched his dog behind the ears approvingly. 

“It’s the very least I could do. I had coveted your talents for a great deal of time, Miss Niima, though I wish the circumstances in which I had earned their keep were different.”

It clicked into place, like the set of a metronome, and in an odd way, things made sense once again amongst time’s rhythmic tick. While he was one of her most appreciative patrons, she had never made the connection that her skills would be utilized as a member of his household before now. 

“You brought me here to play piano?”

She was faintly pleased by this information. She was brought here, at least, to do the one thing she did best. It made her feel foolish, picturing all the domestic work piling up that she was resigning herself to perform each day. It was another kind of performance Kylo Ren himself had been privy to. In her grief she had forgotten how she knew him before the funeral. He had seen one of her earliest concerts and sent flowers for any show he would miss. There weren’t many he was absent for. 

There were flowers for when he attended too.

For a brief moment she thought of the flowers, the seemingly innumerable amount of them now, and how many bouquets he had sent over the years would fill this room. Scores of them since the funeral as well. It would become a garden, a lovely one, but the thought added to her doubt. Was she brought here merely for her musical skill? 

“Yes,” he looked at her from his chair by the fire. “Please, come warm yourself.”

Perhaps her overwhelming feelings were clear on her face. Rey had often been warned by that by her mother. While her hands and back were lovely while she played, if she struggled with the notes her nose usually wrinkled and her nostrils flared in frustration. There was all at once a review, and then a hasty retraction and apology, run by a newspaper who had published a critic who had described her facial features as  _ hissing _ and  _ ferocious _ during a show during her first European tour. 

Mrs. Timker brought her a cup of steaming hot tea. She felt her wet hair drip down her neck. The blanket pulled tighter as she refused to tremble before him. 

As she sat down on the plush velvet chair Rey tried to gather the parts of herself she had assumed she would abandon in this new phase of her life. It was odd to suddenly feel like she could remain herself. Kylo Ren was a patron of the arts: but he was by no means a manager or a talent agent. She had been prepared to give up the piano for little other than pleasure, if ever allowed, in some dead wing of his house no one else dared enter. 

She glanced about the dark drawing room while taking a sip. It was uncannily eerie.

He didn’t allow for much light besides the large fire in the mantle. She knew he was moneyed, and from reputation too good a family to disrespect. But there was evidence of ancestry all over this room. Busts on the mantle. Portraits on the wall. The air felt stagnant: like he entertained her in a storage closet for his own legacy. It was heavy with history, making her shoulders cave in slightly under the pressure, even as she was trained to sit up straight. 

Perhaps haunted, from the look of this house.

“You want me to play piano for you, here?”

Such an instrument filled the corner of the room. Her host nodded with his lips curved in a smile as she figured it all out. 

“And elsewhere. Talent like yours can’t be wasted. It will be sheltered here, as will you, in the wake of this great tragedy. You’ll stay on as my guest.”

He himself was eerie but kind: always had been. His voice was soft while entangled amongst the snapping, blazing fire in the fireplace. She felt as lulled by his presence as the dog with his head upon his knee having his ears touched. His words, like his fingers, sought the right place on the ear to scratch into submission.

“I don’t know how to thank you. I owe you so much.”

He sat up abruptly, and she felt the charge in the air, tossing across the mantle like a nest of sparks: the catch. This would be where he established his rules. Where things sounded nice until they had one condition.

But instead he simply states:

“Please, Miss Niima. Your playing is the only thing that brings me comfort. It is a gift. Never speak again of repaying me.”

* * *

  
  


Rey was led upstairs by Mrs. Timker and shown to her room. Waiting up there for her would be fine clothes, hot food, and leather-bound stacks and stacks of sheet music. She would finally be able to take off her wet things and dry herself and be warm, and all under his roof. 

The thought soothed his weary soul for the first time in years. 

Kylo Ren took up Miss Niima’s teacup from the table where it was left. It wasn’t burning, but still warm as the flush of fingertips over skin. Rain droplets clung to it, left there by her lips.

He brought it to his own lips and drank the remainder of her tea down in one gulp. His mouth against the rain that had touched hers. His tongue darting out to taste every drop. 

* * *

  
  


Rey awoke in the middle of the first night in a nightgown that was not hers, in a bed that was not hers, in a house that was not hers. The unfamiliarity was cloaked in the heavy exhaustion of her travels: but what could not keep her from waking were the sounds she heard at the end of the hall. 

Rey was not placed with the servants, but in a lovely guest room that looked over the property, all the gardens and even a birch wood at the edge of them. Deep and wild and good for hunting, Timker had told her. There was a beautiful window seat that curved along where the overlook jutted out of the house. A pleasant spot to read. It was her little turret: but it was much too dark to see anything but shadows outside by the time she was brought to the room. 

She was confused about her place here. Not sure if she should accept it or make a call to Poe to try and arrange the flimsiest of touring schedules just to her moving through the continent again, unable to worry or even think. But a place he had offered her had seemed so soothing when all she had ever done when her parents were alive was work. This felt like a retreat, and Kylo Ren’s offer is now clearly that of a guest holding high honor. 

Now it was pitch black, the dead of night, and everyone should have been asleep. But she heard strange sounds of all sorts coming from the darkness at the end of the hall.

Her eyes flew open. She was a musician: sound was her sharpest sense. The most powerful, in her opinion. When a sight was strong it only settled into the window of one’s mind. A smell could be stopped by holding one’s nose. Sound, when powerful enough, reverberated through the whole body, vibrating in every bone. It couldn’t be hidden from. Even when she covered her ears, her body flinched when the old house pulsed with whatever noise she was hearing. 

Heavy, but rattling, asynchronous. Like chains. But thudding, like a hammer, or moving furniture around a room. Surely it was too late for that. But she clung, as long as she could, to the hope that this would cease and in the morning Timker would apologize for the apparent construction project being done in the middle of the night.

When the sounds did not cease they finally brought her out of her bed: but her fear of them was equal to waking anyone else in the house. With the silence of the grave, Rey pulled open her bedroom door and stepped out into the hall in only the silky nightie she had been provided with in her closet full of new clothes. 

She relented to wearing it because she was simply too tired to unpack, and it was a great deal finer than her old nightgown. Now she regretted her surrender to the garment. It did not suffice to outfit her for her investigation.

The horrible, drafty chill of the hall had her gasping when she poked her head out of her room.

She did not leave her room to investigate strange noises once before. And if she had, maybe she wouldn’t be in a stranger’s home on this night. 

Rey would not repeat this mistake as long as she was alive.

In the servants’ wing, she would at least not be alone. She could knock on the nearest door and wake the whole hall if she was well and truly frightened. Though it would not be wise to do so if she had hoped to make any friends amongst them, fear can elevate far above social graces in times like these. 

She also couldn’t go to her host: for she did not know where Kylo Ren slept. And she could hardly appear at his door like  _ this.  _ It was uncouth.

Instead Rey took a deep breath and wandered out the hallway with all of her bravery, which was exhausted by the trials of facing her new life, clutched tightly to her chest. Searching for the source of the pounding. Matched only in her tightly beating heart. Near bursting with fear.

The noises stopped at the end of the hall, as if frightened off by her soft footsteps. She peered out the windows at the gardens below, just the skeleton revealed by white lines of moonlight illuminating pale lines of trees and marble sculpture. This place felt truly horrible at night. Dead. Alone. Like another abandoned, decaying planet. 

She glanced back over her shoulder. Now that the noises were gone she almost forgot she had ventured from her room to check for them. Or that they might resume. 

Nothing was there. 

And yet, still, it was torment to think she should go back to bed, as if something were unfinished. She’d not rest until she knew the source of the noises.

But she was very tired and had travelled so far today. Exhaustion thickened her thoughts until all she could do was want to curl up in bed. 

Rey swallowed and tried to calm her pounding heart. Tried to tell herself again.

There was nothing there.

Then she went back to her room and pretended she was safe inside. 

* * *

  
  


There was little to occupy her other than filling a day with small things to keep her attention: and only Kylo Ren would know how generous that was to offer her. 

She had been used to a maddening schedule of touring and rehearsal. If Rey had an extra moment to take a breath: she would never be given the time to take two.

Days passed in the old manor with little ceremony. Rey woke late when the light had filled the bedroom to the brim, not just touching it with a weak slash of sunrise. She did not need to be dragged to constant lessons and concerts. Facing another day here, her time was her own to do what she wanted with it. 

Kylo Ren was usually on his morning walk when she arose. She would lie in a guilty, luxuriant silence because no one would bother until Rey announced her wakefulness. She half-suspected if she slept all day, no one would come for her. She didn’t rush to get out of bed for all the noises that came at night. It was usually when she felt saved by the slant of dawn coming in through the east-facing window of her room that she was able to close her eyes fully.

Timker would see to her breakfast when Rey rang her to bring it up. Rey believed the space was deliberate, the meditative privacy, and his distance was a kindness. She was a young woman in mourning in an unfamiliar house. He gave her all the time she needed to feel comfortable starting her day. She didn’t take advantage, but there was a clever, pleased smile across her lips when she saw how high the sun was whenever she would ring for a maid to bring up a tray, always prompt, always heaped with a ready, hot meal as if it were magic.

Boredom was luxurious after the strict schedule she had been kept to for all these years. Decadent.

He would know: Kylo Ren had also come in direct conflict with that schedule. Rey always had a feeling that, despite his generosity and connection, her parents did not exactly like him. He was present in her life, but not pencilled in. If there was some party Rey had to be at for a Symphony season or a fundraiser, there he would be in an impeccable suit, but when he attempted to reach beyond their casual acquaintanceship into friendship, perhaps more, Rey was mysteriously made even more busy than ever. 

Rey wondered about this. How it felt he had been dangled in front of her when all began to feel adult and exciting, only to be snatched away each time she had interest. It was all very frustrating to have so much time  _ now _ and be too mopey to know how to become friends with him. And to his credit, it’s not like he expected her too. 

Usually in the afternoon, after she’d read or played with Pilot or wandered the house or grounds for a few hours, he’d emerge from his office, leaning with his hands braced on the doorframe and poking his head in wherever she would be. 

He came to her, always, with the request she play for him on the piano for a little while. 

When he came to ask for it, he wouldn’t phrase it so plainly. 

He'd just say,  _ “Songbird?” _ and she knew. 

His songbird. She had thought once that he would be her beau someday when she was a young concert pianist; but something that presence in her life would either be a plateaued, subdued constant or a short burn of furious attention. Or perhaps, upon receiving his offer to live here, she imagined him a cruel employer once he had her where he wanted her in this big house. But here he was less a friend or a tyrant and more her falconer. He’d hold out his arm while she was circling the sky: she’d alight and make music for him when summoned. It was an oddly trusting relationship where each were trained to know their place. Rey could reach her heights. And he would take care of her. Symbiotic in that odd way artistic patronage is. 

Piano was an automatic skill. To play in a man’s office where he was not viewing her on a stage was a rare freedom within her skill. He made no requests for songs, even when she asked if there’s anything he’d like to hear. Instead he just let her run through whatever she was feeling that day. She could do this for him and clear her head, or think as hard as she needed to, or focus on a piece that was too difficult to grasp, too risky in the time allotted for rehearsals, to be performed. The odd ones that weren’t allowed because of the audiences. The ones she longed to hear someone listen to and genuinely feel.

And he’d think. Toying with some odd artifact on his desk, listening intently, puzzling away at something. Sometimes he was so entrenched in work there was no indication he was listening to a song at all. But he always thanked her intently when it was time for them to refresh themselves for dinner. Made some kind acknowledgement, usually even giving a recognizing mention by name and composer, of the piece she had worked on. 

It felt like they were spending intimate time together; but it was comfortable instead of vulnerable. Natural. It wasn’t as awkward as conversation, alone together, at a restaurant after a ballet he wanted to take her to. 

They’d never tried that. It had never worked out that they could. The young pianist was always whisked away from the mysterious man.

Rey had imagined it. Her best dress, which was too prim for an actual taste of nightlife; cocktails, whispering, the hush of a darkened theater. She knew if they had done this back then, things would be different, become different, and she sometimes hid from the thought and just wanted to be a girl to him still. 

She wondered, between the trill of the keys, if they ever would do something like that now that she was here out of his pity. Perhaps that chance was gone. 

Her parents would certainly rest easier in their graves knowing it was over. 

* * *

  
  


Each evening they took dinner together: but a dinner at home was a much more formal affair than out on the town. The service staff was his, and knew him, and knew his guest. He provided the ambiance and hospitality. The best table was his, the seating by design to hold just them. 

They sat modestly far apart, and Rey ate delicately, and they conversed, for the most part, to the benefit of those listening in to refill their water glasses. 

_ “How do you like the fish?” _

“It’s lovely,” Rey ran her sauce-soaked fork over her tongue, “the lemon absolutely dances.”

She’d heard that phrase in London, at a luncheon for one of the opera houses where she’d done her first solo show. Borrowing it for his table felt like a smart theft to make. Like a knife hidden in her pocket for when she’d need it. 

He smirked at her, sensing the unfamiliar taste of the phrase on her tongue with a touch of amusement, but that fish appeared on the menu enough times for her to know a change had been made to suit her tastes. 

She was curious as to why he didn’t press her about what had happened. Once the days were able to develop their own sense of normalcy without much divergence. They managed to stretch on with a tension, and anticipation that he soon would have questions about what had happened that night. 

Those questions never came. 

Time moved like a dream. While he merely let her exist in comfort, every need met, every whim satisfied within the reasonable confines of the house: he never pushed her to talk about it. 

Rey anticipated the waking phase of her life with grim despair.

So during one of those painfully polite dinners: she found the tension in the unasked questions caused a fracture. And she broke across the table all at once.

“I would like to tell you what happened to my parents.”

Kylo went still, furrowing his brow at her from across the table.

“That isn’t necessary Rey, and I fear will only cause you more distress.”

“I want to tell you,” she folded her arms across herself, as she had hoped she could finally feel like she could tell someone. “For I feel it may change your decision to foster me here if I chose to hide this from you. That it was not an abrupt illness set upon them in Paris that killed them. It was murder.”

Kylo emptied his hands of any utensils, flattening them to the table with his palms down and then lifting his eyes in focus to Rey’s face. 

Her own eyes were large with the weight of this secret. They looked so fragile, like they’d burst like soap bubbles if she were touched. She was just a frightened thing at his table. 

He sighed and looked at her sadly. 

“What makes you believe that, songbird?”

Her laugh was cruel.

“Perhaps the knife that killed them, or the blood all over the hotel suite.”

He stood up from his chair.

“You poor thing,” he said, with feeling, and left his chair to go to her side. While Rey remained with a straight back in her seat, he knelt on the floor and held her hands, and kissed them. “I am so sorry you had to see such terrible things.”

She trembled with anger and clutched his fingers so hard her knuckles turned white. She felt the truth in his words: in some ways he had done all he could to prevent her from seeing such a sight.

Kylo Ren had invited her to go with him to the ballet that horrible night where her innocence was lost forever. Her parents made her refuse his invitation yet again. Perhaps if she had gone —and not obeyed her parents and returned to the hotel to take a long bath feeling like a wretched child that she was not permitted to go— she might have been spared the sight awaiting her. She could have been safe in an opera box with Kylo Ren, enjoying the orchestra more than the dancers, while someone else found them dead. Perhaps a neighboring room would have called the police that night instead of Rey.

Perhaps the police would have spared her from entering that room filled with blood by the time the ballet was done. She would have missed all of it. Every awful minute.

Instead it was sulking in the bathroom how she had remained that night until she heard the loud shouts and thumping from the main room. When she emerged in her robe to find what had happened, terrified, her whole life had been taken from her.

“Whoever did this to them is a monster,” she could not swoon into Kylo Ren’s arms as he offered her solace now, but she did weep, bitter tears that twisted her face in anger. “And I hate them.”

_ “Rey.” _

Kylo Ren was eccentric, distant, and a little closed off, but he was never harsh with her. This was the closest he neared to it, just a firm tone when he wrapped his arms around her. He rested at her feet like Pilot did, the gesture just as fiercely loyal in his body, perhaps a greater show of subjugation from the mere size of him to kneel before her. 

“Your hatred will only make you suffer. I will keep you safe,” his hands went from a comforting hug to clutch at her spine. Rey knew little of this sort of thing in her sheltered life, but he made her arch into him, and she felt their bodies deliberate brushing as he held her, “I will keep you safe here with me, where nothing will ever harm you. Your distress pains me. Tell me what I can do to soothe it.”

She had felt this feeling of the truth of that statement from him once before, that he would keep her safe. He was holding her hand as she came out of a rehearsal, slightly sweaty and tired in her frumpy clothes and possessing no plans for the evening. She could join him. They could go see  _ La Sylphide _ together and she would be safe in Paris at night with him. 

Her parents had refused this for her. To be safe from the sight of them killed. She was haunted by that night. If she could only go back and run away for that glimpse of happiness before everything was taken, it would mean more to her than being a good daughter. 

He held her so close her legs fell open and fit him between them. 

No. This was not done. He brought her here out of simple  _ charity— _

His arm slithered around her waist like a giant python and squeezed her close, so close so fast, and brushing against so much of him that a choked cry fell from her lips. He gave her such a shock.

But his hand was gentle as it pressed along the side of her face. His fingertips guarding her temple, the heel of his thumb cradling her jaw. Touch soothed Rey, intimately, even when it was unknown to her before now.

He wet his lips before he spoke:

“I have kept my distance because I knew how much this had hurt you, songbird, but I should have held you instead, shouldn’t I? You were in such pain.”

His words were so tender and she folded into his touch, bowing close, permitting him to move ever-closer.

Her hands came down to cradle his head to her stomach, thighs tensing around his body as a shudder urged him closer. It felt good to be held when she was alone for so long. It dissolved her questions that maybe he didn’t want her after all. Maybe he did, he just respected her mourning, another kindness of his—

The service door banged open. 

“Should we begin clearing in here, Sir?”

Rey was breathless, still being held open by him and watching his eyes glitter at her from above her lap like no one else was in the room.

“No, Mrs. Timker, Rey and I aren’t quite finished.”


	2. Chapter 2

Rey feared for her virtue with pleasure in her horror. 

Her purity was a china cup at the edge of a table, an absent elbow nearly swiping it off, and she watched and didn’t give a single warning because, perversely, she wanted to see it smashed. 

She’d never admit such a thing out loud.

It was premature: all he had done was hold her in his arms until she was calm. The housekeeper interrupted a scene that looked, for a flash, of something else entirely but it was over not even by her own interference, as the master of the house let the girl go shortly after. Kylo Ren merely stayed crouched at Rey’s feet at the table until she dried her tears and admitted she was ready to retire early. He then escorted to her room, kissed her hand when the hallway ended before their destination, then chastely closed the door to shut her inside.

This was too respectful for defilement, she’d give up entirely on the thought based on these actions and her own pride, if not for the knowing slide of his eyes about her face and neck before she shut her door to him.

_ Quite unspoilt. _ Lying in her bed feeling unwanted and soft like a piece of fruit that had been left out too long and was now overripe. Rey practically felt bruises in her flesh from lack of touch.

Yet she felt the charge of it changing her body: she lingered in front of the mirror and looked over the thighs that had hugged him to her body from her chair, the waist he had hugged, the back his hands caressed.

Not a hair on her head was altered, yet last night’s dinner had changed the whole air of the house, and Rey along with it. 

They walked side by side, unspeaking, and Rey couldn’t help the shiver that formed from the crown of her head to her toes as they paced their steps together. 

Which is  _ also _ why imagining it herself in such danger was its own nest of untold intrigue. The housekeepers' close guard had to mean something.

Kylo Ren did not threaten her purity. But he did take her to her room, all the way down that winding hall, together in a tense silence. Perhaps he thought she would turn him away. Rey had been unsure what it proved that she hadn’t. 

They stood there in the hall as he took up her nimble pianist’s hand and kissed it. Knuckles, then strong, slender fingers. She was too entranced to be horrified about the callouses he was caressing. Lips nudging little slips of skin that weren’t as tough, but sensitive. Making her shiver and clutch the doorknob behind her, whether to let herself in or them both was unclear.

All he had to do was come inside.

But as soon as she stepped in, still not a word uttered between them, he swiftly bid her goodnight and closed it fast. Her palms pressed to the chestnut wood immediately. Throwing herself against it as if to both hold it shut and to be as close as possible to him as he left. Feeling for warmth on the other side.

She sensed his heart pounding through the door as heavy as a knock. She leaned against it and listened, wondering when he would walk away like a gentleman, and almost opened it again for him with her mouth dry from hunger when he did not do that immediately.

He was lingering. Why?

Then she heard him take a sudden breath.

“Mrs. Timker,” he said on the other side of the door with a calm that rumbled through the wood against her hands. Even shut in her room Rey could hear it. “Good evening.”

She heard the response. Muted, but judging.

“Goodnight, Master Ren.”

The hall was silent. She wondered who would break first. If Timker would leave her guard of her door or if Kylo would simply open it to escape from her eyes, regardless of what that meant. 

She heard it when it happened: as if at the same time they stood down from each other and walked in the opposite direction. Leaving her room abandoned from the outside. 

Eventually footsteps were completely silent from where she listened at her door, from both the man outside and the protector of her virtue, and Rey was alone. 

She undressed for bed with shaking hands, trembling over buttons, like that door would open up again at any moment.

The noises that night were impossible to ignore, but Rey was too afraid that this time, if she left the safety of her room, all at once she’d pound on every door of the house until she reached him and tumbled safely inside his bed. 

That image of safety was something she clung to until dawn. 

Rey was very tired in the morning. Even if she hadn't spent the whole night becoming  _ ruined. _

* * *

Despite the beginning of this transformation, it came with one intrusion intended to make her feel more childish than ever. 

Timker hovered, as if Rey were a young girl that needed minding. 

It felt as if Timker was the only one who believed that there was any danger to her virtue. Her premise stung in that regard: as no one else seemed to worry at all about what he’d do with her now that her parents weren’t there to take care of her.

She spent the entire day after dealing with the housekeeper’s hovering. On her walk. In the library. During meals. She kept asking if Rey needed anything. 

_ A moment’s privacy. And perhaps for you to never have walked into the dining room last night. _

It did not cease when their master was present. When Rey was playing for Kylo that afternoon, looking forward to her summons all day, Timker took it upon herself to find every excuse to enter the library every few minutes.

He himself sagged into his desk chair and stretched out: eyes closed as he listened, barely acknowledging the housekeeper. But Rey startled every time the door swung open. Dropped notes. Lost pace. 

Even if he didn’t seem to care: Kylo did little during that hour to indicate Rey’s virtue was in any danger. The housekeeper’s attentiveness instead was a cruel reminder of his inaction. He had left her door that night with her reputation un-smudged. Spotless as always.

She was sure something might have happened if Timker hadn’t shown up. Rey was lonely enough, his embrace was kind enough. It felt like something needed between them. Never before had she been given much time to think over if she would ever go through with something like that. But she liked imagining it: and quite liked the idea of something like that being behind her. Bravery made an enemy of the near side of a precipice. Your own side. She wanted to cross, obtain knowledge, reach the other side.

And it reminded her of her mother and father. Rey felt hollowed out by Timker’s gouging eyes all day. She was near tears by the dinner hour.

The meal itself was a perfectly unchanged affair; except for the unexpected heartbreak that made the tears fall quickly for the second night in a row.

Kylo watched her eat her soup in mournful silence and then leaned back in his chair:

“I’m afraid I must leave for a few days.”

Rey could scarcely breathe. It had just been the two of them, and the staff, in that house for so long. And the house had turned as hostile as its housekeeper in just a day. Rey had not imagined herself without him here. For a moment just the thought was unbearable. 

Her eyes squeezed shut and her stomach tensed like she had been punched in the gut. She tightened her grip on her fork and cleared her throat. Which was hard to do when no air could enter her lungs. 

_ “Must _ you?” 

His eyes swam with an emotion too fluid to name. 

“I must,” he repeated slowly. Gauging her reaction to him.

“For  _ what?” _ She asked childishly. 

He blinked at her. Dark eyes glittering. Stunned.

It was out of turn and even she knew it. He cared for her and asked for nothing in return. He could come and go as he pleased. 

Nothing in this house scared her more than the thought of him not in it.

“I must conduct a few matters of business,” he said, taking a sip of wine as if he were very annoyed he had to be explaining his reasons. She was sure he rarely had to do that. Answer to anyone. 

He must have seen her stiffen, for he reached across the table and took her hand. 

Her nostrils flared as they did when she was building to a particularly harsh crescendo. What  _ was _ she to him? A passing amusement? A source of pity? She was very, very lucky she had merely waited to take him into her room, instead of humiliating herself if he did not want her.

He brought her back as his fingers squeezed gently.

“I know in your fragile state of grief it must be hard to say goodbye. Please prepare some special music for me when I return. In return I’ll bring you back a present from where I’m going. I won’t like to be away from you. ”

To her it was simple:

“Then don’t go.”

His nostrils flared at her. At her challenge. 

“I have to.”

Rey slowly blinked and it felt like shutting her eyes after stubbing her toe. Hoping that the blackness would take the pain away.

How many times had they had this argument when Rey was the one who had obligations? Her schedule, her parents? But Kylo Ren was never sour with her like this, never angry as she made the same excuse, always coaxingly extending an invitation to be courted with an  _ I hope this time you’ll say yes.  _

He was never hurt like she was now.

There was no room for argument. Her face felt tight with a pain she could not express. 

So he’d just leave her here.

In response she shrugged, letting it go, dropping it as if it were nothing. It  _ was  _ something. Letting that tension release back to his side clearly irked him. 

He didn’t want her to be upset. He didn’t want her to stop being upset. 

Rey lifted a glass of wine to her lips. She hadn’t indulged in a drinking habit before coming here. Sometimes she’d be allowed champagne at a party under close supervision of her parents. But this glass was red and dark and bitter like it was every night at his table, and even if she’d sneezed at the first glass he ever served her when he first came to eat with him, it felt like the thing an adult woman did when she was facing a sourness from a man she wanted but did not like at that moment. 

It could not be argued: she lacked all of his cunning for it. She lacked all the leverage for it. She could only let him know that she was displeased, and a certain power flared from his obvious discomfort like the low burn of an ember.

Kylo Ren had not kissed her and likely never would. Not if she was his charity. And now he would just leave. 

They finished their meal in silence.

* * *

  
  


After their argument, Rey went up to the tower on the north wing of the manor. 

She met him completely by accident on a winding stairwell. The column of it seemed like a circling stone pit from top to tower to bottom. The top of the tower was fine for stargazing, for thinking, and better for taking a cool breath of air when she was angry. 

Rey took a much-needed breath and looked out at the cold night below. It was odd how she never heard those strange noises characteristic to the manor unless she was in her room. There was never a low groan on an ancient stair, or a heady whine of an un-oiled door. Just that dreadful thudding in the dark: shapeless, without sense.

Still, the cold air on her skin after that argument at dinner chilled her heated spirits. 

By the time he found her on the stairs, returning to the wing of the house where she slumbered, she could only feel shame in herself when she saw him. Even if she met him there completely by accident: she had been avoiding him.

She’d tried to balance her wretched anger at Kylo, however unfair. There was a part of her that never wanted to be ungrateful to him. She was his guest and he was good to her. He didn’t owe her whatever she felt she was owed now, but for reasons she couldn’t control, she felt like not having it would break her. 

He smiled up at her, a good few feet lower as he rounded the steps, like nothing happened.

It was the only time they had been truly alone all day. Timker had been tailing her too tightly. Even their argument had watchers.

“I leave early in the morning,” he put his hands in the pockets of his trousers, “and I have been wondering if you’d even say goodbye to me.”

Rey was silent as stone above him. His smug smile faltered and bloomed into something more serious. Examining. Vulnerable. 

His words stirred against her like a breeze when he told her, with stern confidence: 

“We have time, Rey.”

She clenched her hands into fists as an incredulous laugh tore from her throat. His tone was so sure.

“How can you say that to me? After my parents. Time isn’t…”

It is never guaranteed. But at least they both knew to speak that something important had not happened between them. Something with the potential to be life-altering.

There was an odd smile on his face. Wistful. Affectionate.

“If I felt we didn’t have time, I’d be rushing you into all sorts of things.”

There was something in his voice that made her freeze. Not like a creature about to attack: but quite like a cat anticipating a stroke of a hand before it knew if it would permit it. Relenting eventually. Relaxing. Purring.

“I will come back to you,” he said earnestly, hedging up only one stair towards her. About a dozen or so remained spanning their distance from each other.

“And then what?” her eyelids fluttered dreamily. Would she know tonight what his intentions for her were? Why was she here? It couldn’t be just piano...

Kylo Ren huffed out a laugh to himself. Shaking his head.

“Mrs. Timker lives in fear of my scandalizing you.”

Rey straightened her chin from high above him. She didn't want to talk about the damned housekeeper.

She shook her head back. 

“I am not so easily shaken.”

Kylo cracked a sardonic smile as he took himself up another step. 

“I’m sure she’s heard tales of improprieties from men in my position. Taking advantage of the vulnerable. Cornering young ladies in private rooms, behind closed doors.”

She shivered. This attention placed on her was different. She liked him skirting the edges of being a gentleman. His hand lingering somewhere chaste but with a hint of pressure. A look in his eyes at dinner. During parties, during her old life, he would sometimes whisper something to her in the middle of a crowded room, perfectly innocuous and usually about a piece of music she had just played, but with room for a virgin’s mind for crafting perversity.  _ Why _ did he bow close to her instead of saying it at a respectable distance,  _ what _ was it that he wanted to say to her?

She could be up awake for hours wondering about it. 

“Let her think what she wants.”

Kylo looked away from her and chuckled to himself. 

He then rose up a few steps, towering over her again even if he stood one step below her. He crowded her to the column of the stairwell. Directly behind Rey was a straight drop down the winding spire to the stone floor several floors down.

“Then perhaps I am lucky that we are alone here, and that this isn’t some private room.” Kylo bowed and pressed his lips to hers, briefly “so I cannot be accused of cornering you behind closed doors to do this.”

She let his lips brush hers as he spoke. It was a chaste kiss: at least mild as if the act was meant to scare her. Merely having a hand at a moth so it would fly away instead of crushing it with your hand. 

She didn’t pull away in fright. He seemed to expect her to. For he furrowed his brow at her perfectly stillness and brushed his mouth to hers once more, more thoughtfully this time. 

He was saying goodbye.

Her hands shook, even as tight fists, but she let him do it again.

He seemed much more shaken than Rey when she pressed her lips to his, hard, to return the sentiment.

* * *

He was gone when she saw it.

One afternoon, a pretty, blonde-haired servant girl looked carelessly over one shoulder before she slipped a silver spoon into her pocket. 

It clanged against what must have been a great deal of stolen silver already inside. The musical rattle of the fine cutlery was like a bell around the neck of a sow. It rang so the maid would not successfully get far without attracting notice. 

It was only Rey who saw, slipping into the kitchen for an afternoon snack. She ate infrequently while Kylo was gone. She hardly wanted to arrange her schedule around an empty table. 

The girl must have been polishing silver and thought to be light-fingered about it, if no one was watching…

Rey took a big, crunching bite of her apple as she observed the scene of the crime.

The maid gasped and stepped back from the cutlery, her face pale as her voyeur made herself known.

“Please, Miss, I beg you don’t tell—”

Rey blinked at the scene in front of her disturbed into horror for the other girl. To her she was just as calm as she was a moment ago. But clearly this event changed the maid’s life much more than it did hers.

“I am not the mistress of this house,” Rey said coldly, testing the tone of someone who could be, “it is not my place to dismiss you.”

At least not yet. But Kylo Ren's guest held a mysterious power, all the servants knew it, and so did Rey when she realized how terrified the girl was of it. 

* * *

Flowers were to be delivered each day he was gone. 

In the evenings, from his hotel, he’d telephone to ask her how she liked them. 

_ “Either I’m coming down with a terrible cold or I’m allergic to baby’s breath.” _

He laughed as he lounged in the chair of his suite. Adorably sullen creature. Nebulous under that anger. 

Depths he couldn’t even imagine and longed to someday explore.

Rey was faceted, like a gemstone, the cuts of her made her more interesting to look at. Especially the sharp ones.

“If it is a cold, you should be warm in bed now.”

“But I’m not,” there was a breath implied, as she spoke, that instead Rey was getting more comfortable in her seat at the other end of the line, “I’m up talking to you.”

“Do you think it’s a fever?” he slipped into seriousness, as much as her light tone enamored him, he had to be certain.

“No,” she sighed with a sniffle, “damned baby’s breath.”

He laughed. So infrequent was the sound that it startled himself. 

“If I were there now, I’d insist you be in bed, songbird.”

He felt that hitch in her breath. Rey was quite innocent, yet arousal seemed to fascinate her. He had not meant to push so fast, so soon for her to desire him before she felt at home, but it yielded a sensuality that was too good to resist. 

It was his weakness. He liked to give her something that she liked to play with. A grand house. A fine piano. Whatever thoughts he could press like little lingering kisses against her sharp mind so she’d feel the softness of them. 

“Well you’re  _ not _ here right now,” she said, a dry burn of lingering resentment that he had left. Kylo closed his eyes. He had to. Work was piling up in neglect because he’d rather be listening to her, imagining her as she was so close. It tormented him. Now that he’d held her, kissed her: his plans to not rush her were crumbling. “But if you were, maybe I wouldn’t get into that bed until you made me.”

* * *

  
  


Kylo returned from his business by the time Timker cooled off her close guard of Rey. After all, she hadn’t much in Rey’s schedule to prevent, with him being in the city. 

Observing the theft of the silver had given Rey plenty to puzzle over, which she had still not told anyone about, because it felt more elusive the longer she said nothing about it.

She didn’t really want to. Not to get cozy with the housekeeper, or even out of defense of Kylo’s things. Still, it felt strangely powerful to have a secret. 

Rey had a few days of peace: wandering the grounds, practicing the new piece to impress him when he came home, lazing about or playing with Pilot. 

And when he came back, there was not much in the nature their relationship had adapted before he left. Kylo Ren acted as if things were perfectly normal. Rey was quite embarrassed, in the end, that Timker gave Rey her privacy with the Lord of the Manor simply because he hadn't touched a single hair on her head since his car drove him home as she was able to meet him again by the fire.

He never touched her after he beckoned her near to his chair. Rey took short, quick steps to his feet, awaiting a kiss. Instead he brushed his finger against her red nose.

“Was it a cold?”

She let out a slow breath before shaking her head.

“Baby’s breath. I still kept them near to me and for that I couldn't breathe for days.”

He huffed out a quiet laugh. From his side he procured another bouquet of the offending flowers: fresh as snowfall. 

She accepted them. Eyes watering. A coy smile on her lips.

The fire roared next to him, painting him red, heating her skin. 

“Do you know why I sent you baby’s breath?”

Rey shook her head and lifted her eyes from the cluster of pristine buds. 

He delicately traced a finger across the soft flesh under her chin. Across her throat. 

“Because they tremble, quite like you do.”

* * *

Timker resumed her watch. It made Rey want to scream: it was her turn to be courteous and accept the presence as a burden, as so many in the household might find her. 

But still, it made her blood boil.

At least she was never disturbed while she was playing. That seemed to be the only place the housekeeper was not allowed to burst in with questions. It brought the Lord of the Manor too much pleasure for any disruptions. 

He must have said something to Timker. While there was an eye on her when she walked and traveled the house: the door of his study remained shut while she played.

She was working with a furrowed brow, a sonata that had been giving her a week’s worth of trouble. It had been intended for his return. As requested. 

Perhaps it was her own faltering at the keys that brought him over to investigate. 

She had not anticipated it to happen like this. 

Like nothing had changed except everything that she was to him. Her day just like any other before he put his hands on her shoulders as she worked at repeating a trill between two keys. 

They couldn’t catch the rhythm as soon as he tightened his fingers around her forearms.

It seemed as much as their routine as usual as he swept her hair off of her neck to one side. 

“Kylo?” she whispered, head bowed over the keys, but eyes sliding back to assess him—

He cleared his throat.

“Continue.”

She paused for him to issue further instruction, as she was playing for him, but kept her eyes on the notes in front of her. 

But he simply said:

“You and your music are the loveliest things in this house.”

It seemed that this was quite a typical impulse of his as he pressed a kiss delicately to her neck as she sat at the piano bench. 

She stopped playing, turning into her curtain of side-swept hair to glance back at him, her throat still bared behind her, his lips still upon it. 

Her chest was burning and she wanted to hug his arms to it. She felt too marooned as her one self, with his lips nudging along her skin, treating her like his wife, or perhaps his lover. He had to carry her over that last threshold: but he’d carry her willing as a guest into either type of bed.

“Dare I hope, Rey, that you could want me?”

“Kylo, I—” she could scarcely breathe from the neck his lips currently wandered,  _ “—oh, please.” _

She brought his hands to her breasts. Arching against his palms as they covered her, massive as storm clouds that blocked out all the sun.

“Keep playing,” he ordered, before taking a seat on the bench. His thighs hugged her hips, herding her gently forward on the bench, fitting them snugly with his stance bracketing hers as she obeyed. When her fingers returned to the keys, his hands dove under the little buttons of her blouse. They broke away from the material all at once and clattered on the floor. The silk was peeled efficiently away from her chest and his touch roamed deftly over her skin.

In the span of these few actions Rey changed pieces she was playing entirely, abandoning the new work mid-note for one she could have played with her eyes closed. Because that’s what she had to do.

It was a piece from  _ La Sylphide. _

His hands pinched and kneaded her flesh until she whimpered, quivering for release on his lap. 

Her parents had always been strict about boys for fear of her career. He was not a  _ boy. _ Something learning beside her. They had her so trained to see herself as a musician and even then just an extension of the instrument that she had seen Kylo Ren as merely a fan, not truly a suitor until recently. Not a pursuer. Had this been what the ballet tickets and flowers were for all along?

She would have given it gladly. Defied them. Let them know this was what she wanted.

His touch on her hard nipples became gentle once she was tense as a bowstring on his lap. Something of him swelled under her bottom, definite and hard, and she wanted it. Badly. Her thighs shook for want of it.

It felt like the high tremble of the keys under her fingers were knocking against each bone of her spine, playing her too. He kept at the rhythm she set. 

Rey was lost wondering when would he have struck if he had intended this to be sooner. In the house it seemed obvious in his study, with her at the piano bench for him to pounce on. More natural and discrete than him simply coming to her room or cornering her behind closed doors as Timker feared. But in her old life? Was the aim to have her everywhere she had imagined him? Would he swap this private room for the dark walls of an opera box, or would she fall into his bed at the end of a night together as these things were done in their proper order?

If only she had been given some guidance about what that order was. 

There was a soft longing for her mother that only lasted for a moment. In these sensations under his hands, she could easily feel that she had everything she’d ever need.

Rey felt something in her mind part from itself. Something stripped off from her spirit and flew away in the wind. The part of herself that was always herself, and what she was now. 

How funny it was to shed her skin and not recognize her reflection anymore. 

His fingers slithered between her shaking thighs, pulling her skirt up and letting her legs fall open across his lap. He teased her until she kicked and writhed against him, tense fingers slamming random keys, and kept her on edge until she resumed playing some semblance of proper music. 

Then he entered her.

A pinch resonated like a sharp note in her brain as one thick finger slipped easily inside and wiggled in her slick flesh, burying down, stroking her sweetly as her leg twitched over his thigh.

He laughed warmly in her ear as he circled her clit with his thumb as he played with her. 

“I can’t promise that the old bat won’t walk in if you stop playing.”

Rey gasped, realizing the silence that enshrouded them would summon a suspicious housekeeper, and played a song she hadn’t banged out on a piano since she was a child. That’s how lost she felt, it was the only song she could think of as her walls massaged his finger, hungry, needy.

“Soon, I’ll kiss you here.”

His fingers fluttered along her sex. Rey squeezed her eyes shut and slowed the tempo of the song as painfully as possible to make sure that she could manage to make it to the end without falling to pieces. She wasn’t sure what she would play next. Not with his hand moving like that.

“Maybe I’ll try it while you make such lovely music for me. I’ll sit at your feet and feast on you.”

It was kind of him to elaborate: because all she could think about was  _ when _ but lacked the faculties to ask.

Kisses danced up and down her throat. He felt so solid and wonderful underneath her. 

“But not yet. Just this,” he soothed her as she whined in protest, “we’ll go slow. So we learn how you like it.”

Her soft pink walls sucked on his finger as it withdrew. The feeling was euphoric yet sickly. Wrong and right. Perfect and terrible. 

“You’re just impatient to cum,” he soothed in a whisper against her shoulder, “and then you’ll fly.”

They sat at the bench while he gave them each a lesson: Rey gasped and squirmed and was not half the pupil nor prodigy she was used to being.

But that was alright. It happened as he promised it would, and her soul was free.

* * *

Kylo requested a walk before dinner: telling her not to dress to dine with him but instead to take the air in the birches and then dine in the garden with him. 

Rey dared not disobey after what had transpired that afternoon. Her legs were still shaky and her skin raw from an afternoon bath she had taken. She had asked Timker to send a maid upstairs to draw it in a panic, sure it was clear to everyone what had happened. But everyone else in the house was so calm. Like it hadn’t even happened at all.

Pilot leapt around them in the ticket of woods jovially: the least somber of the bunch. Rey anticipated something quite cold and unfeeling, as if already he grew tired of her. She hoped not: if only because she felt like she had just begun this afternoon.

“Have you given any thought towards marriage?”

Her steps were wobbly enough from what his fingers had done to her this afternoon. Therefore this question almost led her to break an ankle. 

She righted herself by clutching the birch closest to her.

Rey felt dazed as she looked over her shoulder at him. The birch trees were so slender that he did not follow her path she made between them, he twisted his own adjacent to hers, sometimes moving further, sometimes hanging back. She wove between two trunks and suddenly he was coming up beside her on the left. 

“In theory or practice?”

His hands remained in his pockets, which seemed dangerous on the terrain because Rey had to cling to the birches for balance. She doubted he’d fall. He moved with such peculiar grace. But the confidence to not have to catch himself as he moved through the woods as she did unnerved her.

“Either,” he stopped to gaze at her inquiringly.

“I haven’t. At all.”

There hadn’t been a place for it amongst rehearsal and concerts and travel. Now her audience was severely limited: and yet she hadn’t pictured herself anywhere but here the next day.

He turned to her thoughtfully. 

“I feel after what has occurred this afternoon, it would be wise for us to consider it.”

Rey held to the tree beside her for dear life. Kylo wove around a few trunks as if to make his way to face her, but he kept circling instead, and Rey twisted back and forth to keep his eye as he moved. 

“Do you think I’m ruined?” she said with worry, her brow furrowing with concern.

Kylo shook his head.

“Not at all. You are under no obligation for anything that has occurred between us previously. But because I  _ will _ ruin you if you let me. So fully, that you’ll look up at me in complete peace and thank me for it. The kind that restores itself eternally with each sunrise that you'll ask for it again and again. I’d just like for you to know that you’re mine beforehand. Give you everything I have. That it is not for the ruining that I want you, Rey, it never was. I always wanted you to choose me for yourself.”

What choice did she have? When he phrased it so well, and there was no one to object, no family, no circumstance.

When he offered his hand, she took it.

  
  
  



	3. Chapter 3

The night she agreed to be his: the noises began again so much more ferociously than before. 

It was inescapable and drowned her in the impossibility to go to sleep. 

Rey lay awake, shivering from head to toe, but there was something about knowing where Kylo Ren, her fiancé, slept not too far away that kept her just as awake as her fear had.

After what had happened this afternoon; was it as scandalous to seek comfort at his door? 

Rey knew the house well enough that it was apparent, as long as she steered clear of the servant’s wing, she’d find that right room eventually now that she knew the ones that were occupied to avoid. 

As she thought to herself, Rey rested her head on her pillow, flinching at a sickening, resonant groan, mulling over her options in the dark.

He  _ had _ wanted to marry her as soon as possible, perhaps that had meant that this was all— _ arranged. _ Safe. Were there truly no consequences in what standards were ignored when already in a rush? 

As if her future was secure no matter what slipped under the wire before the actual day. 

Her skin still felt clammy from the sweat he had stirred from her skin with his slick touches this afternoon. And that—his touch. It was not as if he wanted her remaining unmolested that way. It was he who wanted her seduced before he sprang his question. 

It was his hand that did it all.

Rey sighed and swung herself quickly out of bed. 

If she acted fast she could float on action without reason, uninhibited by good sense, and propelled by her own stupid surge of bravery. It gave brave purpose in her steps away from the safety of her own bed.

The door creaked when she slid out of her room in her nightie: it whisked dangerously around her pale thighs but she knew everyone in the house was dead asleep and would not be disturbed by a lone door to lay their eyes on the sight of her skin. 

Unless she was at _their_ door, disturbing _them._

Many of the doors were locked. But that did not discourage her. She turned her ear to their shell and heard nothing on the other side. Those rooms were dead: locked or not. She’d know what she found when she heard a breath on the other side. Terrible noises, grating, scratching, thumping, they continued on. She was not sure if she searched for the source of the terror or for refuge in his arms. Rey supposed, stupidly, courageously, it would be whichever she found first. 

There was a sign of life in the room above her own that stirred her from the strange repetition of her search. Looking had become automatic: the acting of finding more focused than the dread of what she may find. 

There was a cool sigh when she pressed her ear to the wood. Life breathed within the room. And it was not locked: the knob gave access when she turned it and the door spilled inwards into the room with a slow, high creak. 

She stood in the shadows of the open space and looked in. 

“Rey?”

Her fiancé was coming towards her, sleep in his eyes, and as if he was not certain she was real he touched her arms, then cradled her elbows in his hands. 

“Songbird? What’s let you out of your cage?”

She found herself speechless as he stood before her, holding her very delicately, her weight gathered in his fingers. Like she could lose herself, drop through the floor, and he would still be there to hold her aloft. 

“What is it?” he whispered.

“I heard noises.”

He went deathly pale and, as if he were not the only thing keeping her standing before, he held her tighter.

“Rey.”

But he said nothing else. She stared up at him, illuminated only in faint moonlight, and shivered. She looked into his room. It was an identical design to hers, despite how he was master of this house and she was a guest. His window looked over the same swath of forest that hers overlooked. It was as if, and she had never known this before, as he saw above, she saw below. 

“I couldn’t sleep, so this time I...I came to you. Now that we’re—”

His arms came fast around her waist. Inescapably tight and delightfully depraved. When she was in his grasp he bowed and crooned:

“You’ve heard these noises all this time? Why didn’t you come to me sooner?”

“I didn’t think I should.”

At this her body could finally move again. Her hands settled on his chest. He didn’t let their fronts separate, so it was a struggle. She wondered what would happen if she pushed. If he’d let her go. 

His eyes on her were fierce. 

“Come into the bedroom Rey, you’ll see there.”

She tried to stand firm as he put his hands on her. Spanning her hips, pulling her up against his body.

She was frightened at the speed of things, though the direction was her own route. Swallowing thickly, she did push this time, with a soft sound. He let her go and stepped away. Slipping back into the shadows.

“My little gem,” he said very softly, barely stirring the stillness of the dark, “it is for the best that you return to your own bed. Sleep. You’re safe here. I promise.”

As if sleepwalking and only now waking, Rey turned on her heel and left his room. The way back in the dark was strangely automatic, second nature, as if she could have performed the route while blind.

Walking on air up until her head hit her pillow, before she thought too deeply on his command, she had obeyed.

* * *

Planning for a wedding filled the weeks that followed: absolutely overstuffed them with tasks to complete in the rush. 

Rey didn’t seem to take to it very passionately. It must have been hard for her. Planning a wedding without her family, not that Kylo had one to provide in droves to make her feel more welcome. Or overwhelmed. 

He supposed he wanted it this way, with no one to interfere, or get in the way. Personalities to manage. This was just between them.

He watched the weariness settle over her with much concern. Never too shy to come behind her and gently rub her shoulders. It was forward of him, but they were engaged now, and she did relax into it whenever he touched her. He would never do anything if it did not help. 

Rey would sigh, and go back to sealing up invitations to guests she did not know, and smile sadly up at him. 

Soon, she would be his.

He had to control himself until she was.

* * *

Rey was startled awake the night before the wedding to find someone had entered her room. 

The rush and responsibility of planning a wedding had truly been knocking her out most nights. She was especially soothed by her visit to Kylo’s door: unnerved as well, but mostly soothed to know he was aware of the frights in this house and convinced she was safe.

For a brief instant she thought her anticipation was finally over: that all would be revealed and she would know for sure what haunted this house before she joined it forever. 

But it was merely Kylo, which prickled an excited wakefulness from head to toe. Usually when one is disrupted in the night, there’s an urgent sense to go back to sleep. But not now. 

Now her aim was to keep them both awake for as long as possible. 

He had come to her door as she had his the night of their engagement. He had stayed chastely away from her, a comfort, a friend, but no more than the consummate gentleman of a fiancé. 

But now on the eve of the wedding Rey was not sure if she should be more afraid to see him or a ghost standing there. 

She shivered and pulled her blankets over the thin silk of her nightie. 

“What is it, Kylo?”

He trembled in the darkness for a moment. Doing nothing else. And then he stalked to the foot of her bed. His hands gripped the posts like bars of a cage.

“After tonight, for the rest of your life, you will share my bed. This will be my last chance: I simply cannot resist entering your bed while it is only  _ your  _ bed. Of entering on your own invitation. Send me away before I become debauched.”

The distinction of these things was as clear to her as it was to him. She’d have to let a husband in for his rights. Would she let him now, as just himself? A man who wanted her?

Rey flopped back against the pillows and thought deeply on this threat. It was probably the smart thing to do to wait for the security of marriage to commit these sins. But.

“You will not be able to keep me out if you make me wait on your answer much longer, songbird.”

Rey smiled softly and stretched her thighs open for him. 

“Debauch me.”

He settled over her with a furious, glorious weight and kissed her harshly. 

“Dangerous, dangerous thing you are.”

His tone revelled in her as he undressed her. As quickly as he could just to bare her flesh. His lips slid down her shoulder as his hands wandered. What happened at the piano could almost be brushed off in the location. Rey did not welcome him here, into her bed. She didn’t even stop playing. It could be argued that it didn’t even happen at all, when all consequences were concerned. No witnesses. No risk of pregnancy. Just his hands pleasuring her as she did what she was here to do.

This was different, and just as strange, and even better, as he slipped his hand between her thighs to pet her slick flesh.

_ “Don’t shake,” _ he implored, sliding his middle finger inside her. “Don’t be afraid. You’re safe with me.”

She was shamefully wet: staining him up to the knuckle. 

“Did you like when I let you cum?”

She groaned pathetically when he stroked her stomach with his other hand. His fingers pumped slowly inside her, stretching her, making her feel filled in a way that promised that when he truly ruined her, it would feel like bliss. More than what she felt now. Which felt impossible.

“It was nice, wasn’t it? Now, why _ now,  _ I can do that for you whenever you wish. Or too much, much too much, until you beg me to let you stop.”

He pressed his lips to her nipple for a kiss and then opened them up to suck on her flesh. She shivered beneath him. 

“Yes, I like that too, that it’ll be so much you can’t stand it. Let’s begin right now.”

It was when he was plunged into her at a great depth that she knew what he meant, and what had changed.

The next morning, she was a little sore, shaking at the muscles of her thighs, as she stood in her white dress and married him. But nothing came between them, no objection or consequence, when they were pronounced man and wife. And Kylo was the one, of the two of them, who looked the most relieved by that when he bowed to kiss his bride. 

* * *

On the honeymoon, a somewhat bold return to Paris as if the city had never hurt her before, Rey rested her head on her husband’s chest. He held her steady there in a tender afterglow, both of them gasping with relief and exertion. Lying still in the dark of the hotel room.

She felt perfectly safe with him here. As if she always would be.

He brushed his lips softly along her brow. He was always affectionate now: if anything the feral passion that brought him to her door the night before the wedding was tamed by matrimony into a tenderness that assured her she would never be alone. He had taken her to the ballet and a late dinner. The adult promises of Paris were experienced in thick, neat slices served on a plate for her, and she had cleaned it to take it all into herself. Consumed the experiences like a hungry young wolf. 

Even in the city where her parents were murdered. There were no tears. Only Kylo.

  
  


* * *

A newly married Kylo Ren offered her a smile across the breakfast table like she had greatly pleased him. 

Her new life was startlingly dream-like. It shouldn’t make her glow, sit up straight like she was at a piano bench, and suppress the need to bow as he gazed at her proudly. But it was a form of applause, just in his eyes, and she still felt much warmth from it.

“I would dare say that married life agrees with you.”

Timker left the dining room with the coffee pot with a dissatisfied sniff. She could have rung someone else in to complete the task; but her displeasure upon her exit seemed to indicate something.

Rey bit back a smile that the housekeeper was in such a huff.

Marriage was certainly less stressful than being cornered on stairwells by brooding men she was dependent on. She sensed the unspoken brag in his observation and lifted her tea to her lips, not giving him complete satisfaction to bask in his own gloating. 

Her lack of response did not let the subject fall gracefully. Her husband lifted his hand and brushed a thumb along the shadows under her eyes.

“...even for lack of sleep.”

She bit her lip to keep the laugh from bouncing out at him, but it was a furious, twisty smile that he caught under his keen eyes and it made him grin, feral, viciously proud, before capturing her lips with his.

She had not managed much sleep lately: but all the groaning and thumping of furniture was sourced most heavily from her room when he came to her in the night.

It was not proper to kiss her husband at the breakfast, not more than a peck in greeting as she walked in the room, but now he grasped the seat of her chair on either side of her knees and dragged it up close to him. There was no escaping it. And it was quite nice. 

“How does it suit you to be married?” 

She wanted to know, as he had only shown signs of approval and appreciation.

He groaned happily against her mouth and her chair inched further until she had to open her knees to allow one of his to slide between hers.

“I wanted this. Wanted you. Always.”

She shivered as he licked into her mouth, claiming her, hands cupping her cheeks and holding her still to do it properly. 

Then a word popped into her head through the clouds he had cast throughout it. Laughter rang from her lips like a false note. He pulled away with his brow raised. 

Rey knew she broke the thread he had been using to reel her in. Always dangling bait, coaxing her closer. He cast so many of those, he would find a million more just in the way she finished her breakfast, and she so rarely wriggled free off of his hook to lean back and look up at him.

_“Always,”_ she teased with a grin, toying with the wrap that bound her sweater together at the waist, “You couldn’t have wanted that frightened child who nearly wept at the piano if anyone looked at her at her debut.”

Kylo narrowed his eyes at her. 

“I asked your father for permission to marry you when we were in Prague.”

Rey opened her mouth to argue, then abruptly closed it as she raced to remember Prague. She would certainly remember if there had been an attempt to be made love to her while she was there. She’d spent her twenty-first birthday there on another grand tour and it had been quite unremarkable because she had been working the entire time. Kylo had taken her on a walk along the Charles Bridge in the fog between performances and hadn’t done more than shake her hand, much less make overtures to her for marriage. There was no indication back then that this would be happening. 

She chuckled fondly, a little awkwardly, to discover her husband’s secrets had contained a plan to make an honest woman of her for much longer than she ever knew. She wasn’t sure she liked that possibility as much. She assumed the intimacy of proximity had persuaded him instead. She didn’t know him like she knew him now. Shared his bed, received his kisses. That man in Prague was a different man than her husband. 

“I suppose obtaining his approval so early is just one of your efficiencies.”

His eyes darkened and he scooped her out of her chair, arms seizing her around the waist and lifting her into his grasp. This wasn’t fishing with a lure. This was plucking her from the stream with his bare hand. 

“Your father forbade it.”

Rey’s eyes softened for a moment with sadness of the permission never granted to him, then swiftly widened in shock. She had no idea her parents were in the business of granting approval to suitors, or that she had suitors to begin with. Kylo had been turned away by her father. She tried to track the months of the year that had followed. Rey had been told she was a woman now: she mustn’t spend so much time alone with Kylo Ren as people would get  _ ideas _ about her. Her schedule had intensified to the point that between work and travel she felt she hadn’t a moment to breathe. And Kylo was there, at every performance, sending flowers and best wishes and invitations and would steal into parties with his grand connections for a moment he would speak with her and grasp her hand—

“Maybe I should have told you that before,” he said darkly, looking carefully over every expression that flitted across her face in the course of a few seconds. And there were many. Confusion, shock, pain, shame. “Or not told you at all.”

She was still breathless as she tried to figure all this out. The denial he had received from her father, her father who never once told her she might be loved by someone else.

“But in the end, this was all about what _ you _ wanted,” he added gently, holding her so completely, as she was his. “The only permission I needed was yours.”

Rey swallowed, her heart trembling in her chest, and lay still in his arms as he kissed her.

* * *

  
  


She wandered the grounds that afternoon with trouble tangling her thoughts. 

She whipped a birch branch for Pilot to give chase, the dog moving as swiftly as the stick. Her mouth pursed in a sour way, thinking about the small parlor in the hotel suite and the two cups of tea that sat there when she came home from a rare shopping excursion with Mother. She had teased her father for his apparent guest, and was told coldly to dress for her evening concert. 

Now the afternoon went from odd to terrible. How confused she was that her mother suggested that she and Rey go out shopping for a new dress while in Prague, as if every other fashionable place they had visited before had not involved Mother dragging Rey bodily away from shop windows as she pleaded to just look at the pretty things inside. Her father’s temper when they had come back to the hotel and seen that he had not been alone there. She did not think about it and merely went to bed when she was told. Rey was still a child in their eyes, and perhaps truly was one, for she had not seen that this was the day Kylo had asked to marry her and take her away.

A child had not been able to think about the fact that her parents were murdered; and there was no reason for anyone to want to harm them. She had only thought about how her life had been changed by whoever had taken their lives. She lounged in the bath as they were slain, and the villain had not crept into the bathroom to harm her. She’d sometimes shiver at how close she had been to death. But maybe, with the way things turned out, not so close to it at all. 

How miserable touring had started to get, how eager to be taken she may have been. But she would have missed her parents terribly. 

She sat down at the lip of the dry fountain, drained for the season, while Pilot nudged her knee with his nose. 

She supposed that didn’t matter now. She missed them terribly regardless. In some ways her life had worked out this way no matter what her father had chosen. Darkly, she’d dare say conveniently. But at least she had Kylo. 

Or at least Kylo had her.

Her gloved hands tightened around the stone underneath her. 

It was not Rey who thought to return to the house, but the loyal dog. 

Perhaps hungry for dinner. But when the hound returned to the kitchen door and she was not with him, Kylo swiftly removed himself from the house in search of her. 

He did not have to go far. She was still frozen in one spot in the Winter-deadened gardens, wanting to crawl out of her own skin.

“Rey,” he was in the process of catching his breath, as he had rushed to find her since he had suspected she had gone missing, “you frightened me.”

She lifted her eyes from the gravel beneath her feet that dusk had begun to tint blue.

“You frightened me too.”

Kylo’s mouth tightened in a thin line and he gathered up her nearly frozen hands in his own. With an insistent tug, she is brought to her feet. But he doesn’t move to bring her inside the house.

“There is something I must show you.”

* * *

  
  


A gold cage was in his cellar. 

Any woman should have a million questions if her husband had a golden cage in his cellar. But she couldn’t bring herself to ask any of them. Instead she stared. 

It was empty, but in the way empty cages always are, seemingly waiting to be filled. 

Rey swallowed a scream when the steps her husband led her down brought it into her vision from the darkness, a cage shaped for a bird, but the size to fit a human body. 

Her mouth was dry and she was afraid: but she looked from it to him and his strange silence. 

“What do you do down here?”

He frowned at her. “Nothing. Nothing yet.”

“Why,” she grit her jaw and glared up at him, _“why_ are you showing me this?”

He looked at her sadly and then stepped away into the room illuminated by one pathetic light fixture hanging from the dank ceiling. A yellow glow weakly reached for the walls from the center of the cellar: did not successfully touch even one of them. Everything was cloaked in shadow. 

“For a long time, I had hoped you wouldn’t figure it out, and we could be as happy as possible. For your sake. But I suppose I should tell you about your parents.”

Rey still placed the murder of her parents and Kylo as dots on a line, she was she was generous in the space between those lines. Perhaps he would connect them by some tragic, fated circumstance. He had not intercepted the villain in the hotel lobby. He had almost called and just missed the shocking event. He knew something, maybe that he did not tell her. 

She tightened her hands into fists and prayed that it was some accident, and his guilt could be placed elsewhere, and she could forgive.

But he spoke as if they could never know happiness together again.

“I had hoped that when you came of age they would understand that you could decide for yourself. Where you placed your extraordinary talent. Who you loved. I was wrong when I came to Prague to ask that I pursue you properly, and marry you if it was what you wished. It wasn’t your  _ choice _ then. To have what you wished. Your father refused me, and this offer, which I made generously designed more towards his benefit as I knew how he used you. Your gifts and your beauty and your potential. I knew you would come at a price and I was willing to pay anything, but even that was not enough. They had successfully imprisoned you since childhood, exploited you, and kept you from belonging to anyone but themselves because of the money you made them.”

“They loved me,” Rey replied, her eyes wide. 

Kylo didn’t turn to look as he extracted keys from his pocket and went to the door of the cage. 

He opened it and stepped inside. 

“They used you for your power. They had a prodigy and refused to let you go because of what you were worth.”

“Stop it,” hot tears pricked her eyes. Her parents were  _ slain  _ by a monster _. _ No one should die like they did and have someone say such horrible things about them after they were gone.

“Come here,” he said, eerily calm, and finally looked at her. 

It wasn’t fair.  _ His _ eyes were sad.  _ He _ looked wounded. 

She had broken his heart by realizing what he was. The monster she hated. 

She didn’t move.

Kylo sighed. 

“Come here and I’ll tell you what happened.”

She growled at him and took a numb step towards the cage. The gaps in the bars were widest at the base, she assumed she could get a leg through, but narrowed at the height of her waist and became too small to fit a finger through where they came together at the very top. She examined the contraption warily, unable to link a purpose for it to its existence.

“I tried to reason with them. I sent countless letters over the year after my offer imploring them to just let you decide for yourself if you could love me and marry me. That’s all I wanted. I wasn’t here to change what was in your mind, Rey,  _ please.” _

She brushed past him, too disgusted to be so near him. She spun on her heel in the center of the cage to turn away from him.

Tears leaked out of her eyes but she was too stunned to even blink.

“Who killed them?”

He took a deep breath.

“You looked so lovely in the bath that I didn’t mind that we missed the ballet.” 

And then he stepped out of the cage and slammed the door shut on her.

Rey was frozen with terror. Trapped. He didn’t even step away, just clutched the bars and looked in at her. Lust darkening his eyes. 

Memory fueling that lust.

“Naked, pale breast flushed with steam,” his voice was rich in the past, “If you’d have let me, I’d have come to the edge of the tub and kissed it for you. I always knew that pleasure would make you pliable: I didn’t know it would make me adore you, as I do, so entirely.”

Rey threw herself at the bars, a cry in her throat, gasping out a sob as she struck her shoulder and hip as she tried to twist through. Kylo wove around the curve of the barred walls from the outside, spinning the keys in his fingers, until he stood where she was all tangled. 

He circled her as she struggled. Calm as can be.

When he came back around and tried to take her chin in his hand she bit him. Hard enough to draw blood.

He removed his hand from her teeth without violence and with tremendous patience. Ignoring the bleeding.

“Rey. You’re not seeing things clearly in your fear.”

He tucked the keys in this pocket. Her face reddened as she hissed in anger at him. Incapable of speech.

Kylo pursed his lips.

“In your desperation, you forget your own cleverness,” his hands reached for her and spun her lightly so one foot and shoulder were free in an instant, half in the cage, half out. 

With one more tug at her shoulder she slipped easily to his side. Freed.

Rey took a few fast steps to put some distance between them. Relief warred with wariness of whatever point he could be trying to make. 

In her panic, she had tried to push through without thinking. It had only trapped her more. Now she was liberated. His cage couldn’t hold her, but for what?

Why did it even exist?

She hiccuped at the tears running down her red cheeks, but Kylo took the keys back out and opened up the cage door again. Which was just silly. A stupid game and distraction. He’d just proven she could escape any time she wanted—

He stepped into the cage. Her significantly larger husband. Just looking at the width of his torso beside the bars was a parody of how easily she slipped through them.

“Whereas, I cannot, through any cleverness, escape without your help.” 

And he slammed the door shut and tossed the keys outside the cage at her feet. 

He took two bars in his hands and just looked at her. He’d never fit through them. His body was broad where she was slender. He bowed and tilted his head beseechingly, his temple pressed to the bar clenched in his right fist, looking at Rey as his jailer with perfectly innocent eyes. 

As if she would give in and set him free after what he had done to her family. 

He was a monster. 

He was trapped.

She straightened her chin and glared at him. Even stooping down as he was, he was a great deal taller than her. He couldn’t free himself as she had.

“But you are not desperate.”

He shook his head.

“I have been desperate ever since I first laid eyes on you.”

Revulsion pulsed through her veins, tight under her skin.

“Enough games. Get out of there. You’ll rot in proper prison after I call the police.”

A cage to trap himself, not her.  _ But why? _

“When I get out of here will be for you to determine Rey. When I have atoned.”

She swallowed and looked at the keys at her feet. This was not a game. 

This was something horrible. 

She bent and snatched the keys in her fist, intent on unlocking the bars to end this. Or vanishing upstairs to telephone the authorities. 

But when she rose, her knees straightening, she bit her lip and considered the situation. The tremendous power of it. Her parents died horrifically. There were times she could only dream the fate she wished on their assailants. And not his life was unfortunately in her hands. She could torture him. She could simply forget him down here and have her vengeance. She could deal with the object of her hatred by doing nothing at all. 

And he gave her that power. It was hard not to resent it, and be grateful to him, and it was too complicated to know how she would react to this yet.

But she knew one thing:

“You will never atone for what you’ve done to me.”

He lifted his hands from the bars and opened his palms to her:

“So by your choice, my Rey, my precious garnet, I will remain here forever.”

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> weeeeeeeeeeeeee!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Food deprivation. Kylo goes without food for the first three days in the cage but from then on is fed regularly.

Kylo Ren was declared missing the next day. 

According to other members of the house, he had gone out to search for his wife who had taken too long on her walk that day, only for her to return that evening having not seen a trace of him. Investigators took what note that they could, the master of the house sometimes left on business, but nonesuch could be traced as the source of him vanishing without a word. 

His young bride was frightened beyond words. The pitiful creature had already dealt with the loss of two parents. Out of fear of distressing her, no one dared presume him dead just yet. They kept their tones hopeful, their eyes deceptively open for clues. All to assure her he would return to her soon: because no one had the heart to admit otherwise, what with there being no leads to his disappearance.

The servants certainly whispered, but nothing could be proved. No one thought to check an unused cellar that the Lord of the Manor himself was always peculiar about allowing people inside. It was unused for decades, and something about the man himself made his location assumed to be as far away as possible, not on the grounds.

Rey continued her days wandering the house. Weeping at the piano. She couldn’t bring herself to even touch the keys again. This was her gift and it brought her so much grief. Kylo’s notice. Her parent’s expectations and strictness. The burden of her potential. 

At least she managed to weep over something, because no one was too suspicious, like how they would be for a dry-eyed bride during the week that her husband went missing. 

Unfortunately the swiftness with which he was declared missing but a damper on her own plans. She had not even decided if she would involve the police in her revenge when investigators were at her door. Now that she hadn’t told them the truth, what she now knew...it was quite complicated, wasn’t it? 

Her revenge was in her own hands. She had much to consider.

After days of puzzling, hoping the matter settled itself with the body in the cellar, Rey found she still didn’t know what to do with him and still needed some time to think. More time than he would survive her simply ignoring the matter altogether. While she did not want to be complicit in keeping him alive any longer, it was necessary until she knew her next steps. But she enjoyed the days she stayed away, wanting to press her foot down harder on this monster’s throat until he just couldn’t stand it anymore.

After the first three days: she went down to the cellar to feed her husband. 

  
  


* * *

Kylo looked mildly surprised to see her, or perhaps to see her again so soon. 

He smiled and eagerly came to the edge of his cage like the lions at the zoo waiting to be fed. Because she knew how she would escape from this room, she could observe it a little better. There was an urn—upon closer inspection a chamberpot— settled on the floor, that prompted a shudder. She looked at it and internally fretted over  _ that _ more than any other logistics of keeping him trapped there. 

A  _ human _ trapped there. 

The image was so absurd the situation hit across her mind once again. The floor itself was dug up under the bars, soft earth, maybe more comfortable than the stone that was under her own feet.

_ He’d built it for himself. How thoughtful. _

He looked worn from the three days he was trapped. Shadows floated beneath the translucent skin under his eyes. He was a large man, imposing and strong, and she could tell immediately how three days without food had impacted him. His lovely dark hair was now limp and dirty against his face. 

“Why don’t you just shout,” she crossed her arms and looked at him from the base of the stairs. She would go no closer. For now. “Timker would surely hear you from upstairs.”

He tilted his head with a seductive smile. Even looking more ragged than she’s ever seen him. It was hard to picture her husband as a murderer. This man had dropped some of the pretense. She saw his discomfort, his vibrating frustration, how ill at ease he was and how that made him look slightly cruel.

“That’s not what this is about. I don’t mean to escape.”

_ “Hmm.” _

Rey extracted the apple she’d hidden from her pocket and tossed it through the bars. He caught it without thinking, looking distastefully in recognition. He must have supposed she’d have to feed him eventually, but hoped she’d come down to do more. And such a small offering couldn’t be comforting.

“What do you mean to do?”

He had stood up when she walked in, like a gentleman would from his seat when a lady entered the room. But now that she had paced the room a few times, watching him clutch the apple in his fist with more need than he’d clearly like to show, he settled himself on the floor. 

Her husband was most likely exhausted and hungry. But he didn’t eat in front of her. Perhaps he thought it rude to, when she didn’t have anything to eat herself. 

“I don’t mean to do anything. I rest my fate in your hands. This is about what you want.”

The repetition of those words set her teeth on edge. She almost growled at him from outside the bars of his cage. 

“Funny how suddenly it’s my responsibility, after everything you’ve done.”

Kylo began to shine the apple skin against his wool coat. He was dressed how he was days ago: when he went out in search of his wife, before everyone was in search of him. It was cold in the cellar, almost as cold as it was outside. He might not have taken it off since he was locked in. 

She could tell from the way he was preparing the food, so he could sink his teeth into it without thought once she left, as soon as it wouldn’t be rude to do so. 

She cleared her throat, a strange pull in her own stomach. 

“Just eat it.”

His eyes came to hers suddenly. 

“I’ll wait until I’m alone. I wouldn’t be so rude to my own wife.”

“You  _ murdered  _ your own wife’s only family. We’re past good manners.”

“I might be a killer but I would never abandon my manners towards my wife.”

She took a tense breath. 

“Fine. Give me half the apple.”

He didn’t even hesitate. He held the fruit through the bars, back to her, to deal with serving. Risking her not giving it back. 

Rey swallowed and took it into her hand, staring at the shiny red skin. 

“Don’t pretend to be good. I know what you are.”

“That’s why it’s for you to decide my punishment, songbird. You know what I am. And what I truly deserve.”

She considered dropping the apple on the cellar floor, just out of his reach. So he would have to stare at it as he went starved. 

With a sigh, she took one bite and then tossed it back to him. 

“I’m done. You can have the rest.”

His eyes flickered with uncertainty and then his teeth snapped into the apple with a ferocity that unnerved her. While he had made a point to remember his manners: he ate like he was feral. But she assumed that was the hunger. The apple was gone in seconds. Juice dripped down his chin and his tongue swiped beneath his lip to catch what he could

She didn’t know what else to say. 

He didn’t seem the least bit embarrassed to be helpless, degraded, in a way.

“It’s your vengeance for you to toy with. I hope it brings you pleasure.” 

Rey gripped a bar in her fist and glared down at him. 

“Nothing you do can bring me pleasure.”

He looked up at her with his starved eyes glittering. 

“But you can bring yourself pleasure, knowing I’m here, I’m sure.”

* * *

Rey kept her mouth shut. 

It was too late to alert the police of what she knew. She had committed her own crime, and hidden it. It was too late to let anyone else in the house know she must escape. She’d only be suspected of his disappearance. 

Rey was trapped. She could only remain until she could leave without notice. Perhaps when he was truly declared dead.

That night, she was kept madly awake at the memory of his teeth gnashing into the apple. She pictured that mouth at her throat, against her naked breast. Biting at her as she lay back in a bathtub in Paris. Making her scream.

She got out of bed and listened to the house for a moment. 

It was utterly silent without its master. 

Rey groaned and took a quick angry breath of the stale air around her. It was only her breath that filled this bedroom. There was something about having another living thing in the room with her when she was married that was luxurious. Not quite a pet. But something breathing beside her, with unfamiliar warmth.

She had not been a bride for long but already was unaccustomed to an empty bed.

With a growl, she opened her door and walked blindly to the servant’s quarters. She wasn’t entirely sure what she was doing until her knock on the door prompted a terrified yelp from the maid inside. 

The door opened warily, just a crack. A blonde head so sleep-disheveled hair poked out.

“Is there something wrong, ma’am?”

Rey was breathless for a moment, staring down at her. 

“I told you how I wasn’t yet the mistress of this house?”

The little maid went pale in the dim light. It was clear on her face that she thought she would not be dismissed. Rey needed that fear. 

She thought of Kylo, and how he referred to Rey’s pleasure. How it made her pliable.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Now I am. Remember that,” Rey swallowed the lump in her throat. “I want you to go downstairs and make a tray of food for me now.”

The maid’s brow furrowed with nervous caution.

“And bring it back upstairs for you? You’re hungry?”

The girl was sleepy and it was, admittedly, a bizarre request at so late an hour. Her tone was tentative, sensing there was a test, but hopeful that it was merely the demands of a spoiled mistress.

Rey shook her head coldly.

“There’s a guest waiting in the cellar. Bring it down to him.”

The maid shivered from head to toe, but swallowed a frightened sound and nodded.

Rey tightened her jaw.

“You are to bring him a tray every night, at this hour. Do not forget. Do not tell anyone. Or you will be dismissed from this house with the reputation of a thief.”

There was a sharp nod, first eager, then it slowed to something jerky and unsure. The maid knew not what she was agreeing to. 

_ “...and,” _ Rey bit her lip, “some hot water, and a basin. And soap. He’ll need to wash.”

There. Rey was doing it now. Kylo had planned for himself in his time there: but now Rey was making the arrangements to keep him. Now that she had done so, she was complicit. The captivity was out of his hands, as he wanted it. Rey negotiated what she thought he deserved, what she thought a  _ monster _ deserved. 

She had caught herself making up terms she did not like. She had made herself responsible for him. Even if she hated him: a person obviously deserved to eat, and to at least feel clean. 

These are things she didn’t want to make it her power to decide. 

The girl slipped past her into the dark. Rey went limp against the doorframe, not sure what had possessed her to do this, to tell the maid, to reveal her secrets. 

Perhaps to remove the weight of them from her soul. And to only use this power once before it would be taken away: herself imprisoned for stooping so low.

She went back to her room to wait for the authorities to come for her, as she was sure the girl would run straight to them when she saw Kylo like a lion in his great cage, and they would be there by morning.

* * *

  
  


She thought the thieving maid was too cowardly to complete the order until she went down two days later. 

She wasn’t intending to go often. But if he in fact hadn’t been fed when Rey had planned him to be, she’d have a bigger problem, and she should check on her own.

He looked slightly better than the last time she saw him. Twin silver trays stacked on the floor outside his cage, empty dishes licked clean. So she had been going down there. How could Kylo have pacified her that she didn’t immediately tell anyone about him being locked up? 

He was standing at the bars as well, called by her footfalls on the stairs. Eagerness in his eyes when he saw her.

“You’ve been hospitable, songbird. Have you begun to forgive me?”

She snorted when she shouldn’t have. Nothing about this was funny. 

Instead she leaned on the cellar-door and looked at him. It was odd to see a formerly self-possessed man in a barred enclosure with nothing but dirty dishes and a chamberpot. 

“Tell me more about the murders.”

He sighed. 

“Causing you any unnecessary pain—”

“Was in the end all you have achieved, because my family is dead.”

He looked at her and pursed his lips. He seemed to be trying to explain himself to someone else for the first time. When his explanation made sense to him, but not in a vocabulary that could be shared. 

“There was one evening when you lost an earring backstage. Do you remember it?”

At first it was as jarring as a slap to be asked. Her career at the piano was a blur. There were hundreds of evenings, hundreds of stages. 

But Rey did indeed remember the hiss she let out when she touched her bare lobe one night, a lost pearl, and the dust caking her hands and knees as she crawled in the half-lit theater to retrieve it. Some things she did not forget. Her racing heart and flushed face. Her anxiety. 

_ Mama would have been cross with her if Rey didn’t find it.  _ These expenses were investments in her career. They were not rich from the money Rey made with her music, as money had to keep up appearances to keep them in a world where she could continue to do so. Travel, accommodations, dress. A pair of earrings was an investment into Rey’s future. An item that would earn their keep, as Rey had to. They were not just something to be worn and lost by a careless girl. 

Rey had sneezed at the dust filling her nose, somewhere in a darkened wing, all alone. She had snuck from her dressing room before her parents learned of what she had lost, but the longer she was gone, the more likely they’d come looking for her. And she would be scolded for the stains on her dress she acquired while crawling around looking for the bauble.

A voice curled out of the darkness towards her bare ear:

“This is not how a true artist should receive her regards for a great performance.”

Rey’s head had lifted, bereft to be caught in such an embarrassing position.

Kylo Ren stood where she was, behind the curtain, flowers in his hand and his coat over his arm. Perhaps he had tried her dressing room and been turned away by her parents. Again.

“I lost my earring.”

She was so miserable and so longed to tell someone: even if it made her look stupid she would at least tell the one person who couldn’t punish her mistake.

His eyes softened. Watery, ashamed tears began to gather at the corners of her eyes. He always regarded her so highly, and now she must look like a stupid little girl. Wasteful.

He came to his knee beside her, in his lovely black suit, and his hands spanned the floor beneath him as he too began to search.

“I don’t think it can be found, I just had to try—” she sniffled and bit her lip. 

There was a quiet, contemplative pause beside her.

A finger reached out and touched the ear that was unadorned. 

“Such a pretty lobe, perhaps even more lovely without it.”

Rey shivered and gave a watery laugh. He was always kind to her. She still wasn’t sure why her parents were so protective about him. Kylo Ren was one of her most impressive admirers. 

“Tell you what. We’ll blame myself for the loss. You got lost in a corridor and I redirected you too firmly, it went flying, and I’ll offer to your parents to replace them. Then tomorrow, I can take you out shopping and you’ll have a new pair. No harm done.”

It was too generous. Rey had closed her eyes at the offer and  _ wished _ it would be that easy. But it would only anger her parents more that she had led Kylo Ren to believe he owed her somehow, and she still knew it would be her fault in the end, no matter what excuse he gave them.

“No, it’s not worth the trouble. Besides, I’ll only be scolded. It won’t be so bad. Please don’t waste your money remedying my foolishness.”

The lights of the house flicked off, enclosing them in darkness, and solitude as it meant the house was empty. 

Rey gave a soft gasp, and a hand closed around hers. 

“It’s alright,” lips moved slowly towards her naked ear, “I’m here.”

She squeezed his hand tightly when she felt a soft warmth brush over her skin. 

“Someday, you will be kissed here, if you forget your earrings…”

_ “Rey.” _

The voice made her flinch away. The cry echoed from the hallway outside the door. It must have been important, it was her  _ father  _ searching for her instead of just Mama. That was a bad sign. If caught, it wouldn’t be easy to explain this situation.

Rey shuddered in the dark and stood up.

“It will probably be best that they do not know you were alone with me. Thank you, Mr. Ren, for your kindness.”

“I’ll keep looking. If I find it, I’ll have it sent to your hotel.”

_ She scarcely remembered what excuses she made as she left him.  _

Rey clutched the bars of the cage in front of her as she remembered going to find her father, leaving Kylo Ren in the dark with his flowers, and most of all that her bare ear had been kissed by this man, many, many times now. Her reverie had gathered her up to stand before her husband, the bars between them now, her eyes fluttering with confusion.

“It was then I saw that you were frightened of them.”

He looked completely at peace as he explained this to her. Rey’s mouth went dry.

“I carelessly lost an expensive piece of jewelry. Anyone in their right mind would be scared to face their parents afterwards.”

“And a replacement could be bought, and extras, one for every five pairs your mother purchased with your earnings.”

Rey shrank away, her mouth hanging open. He looked angry at this statement, angry at her mother, angry at his  _ victims. _

“You were petrified,” he told her, and it unsettled something deep within her to be told of her own feelings. “I saw it.”

Rey let out an indignant cluck.

“So you chose to  _ murder _ them?”

“I set you free.”

Rey let out a heartless laugh.

“And sacrificed your own freedom in return.”

The words felt poisonous on her lips, and wrong. She stepped back in fright.  _ Rey  _ hadn’t locked him down here. He locked  _ himself _ up on his own volition. That hadn’t been her choice. 

So why was she thinking like it was what she wanted?

“You’re going to  _ pay _ for what you did.”

She shook her head and let her eyes wander the bars of his cage. This all felt so unbelievable she almost reached into her pocket for the key.

Why did she even bring it with her? She wasn’t down here to let him out.

Why had that horrible thing never left her side since he was sealed up down here, like it would ever be used?

* * *

  
  


The maid didn’t speak. She did her duty. And she never met the eyes of the mistress of the house nor the man in the cage. 

The man was at least polite to her, who was the master of the house, once, though she supposed not anymore with the way things were going. It was curious. When she brought him food, he never asked to be let out or even looked distressed. She’d come back from taking the pot out to the woods and he’d be calmly sipping tea in the cellar as if he were in the dining room with a newspaper in front of him. 

The only thing that was hard was that Mrs. Timker was harsh about the maid’s lateness. Thinking she would sneak off to dawdle when she was on an errand to the mistress, though she could not say it was so. It was a secret.

The mistress herself was cold about the subject: which was hardly ever spoken of. But she did raise the maid’s salary, doubled it, then absently tripled it: so as the lady of the house had done when she was just a visitor, the maid said nothing. Occasionally Mrs. Ren would grasp her elbow, worried, and hiss for her to see to it that their guest had a blanket for the incoming snowstorm. 

There were no rules about declining her prisoner’s requests: though he made few of them. After a few weeks she grew bold enough to ask if he wanted anything, secret-like, but he merely smiled and shook his head. 

“Until it’s decided I deserve something, I won’t ask,” he said clearly, his shoulders wrapped in the blanket her mistress asked that she bring him, his fine clothes rags underneath. Then he did something curious. He looked at her and drew a finger to his lips, as if shushing her.

So she didn't speak about it. Man seemed happy enough down there, if only the Mistress seemed bothered about it.

It was almost normal, not at all unpleasant as the nasty business seemed, until the day a sleek black car arrived and a man with ginger hair stepped out. He came to the door and sniffed as the maid took his hat and Timker asked what his business was.

“If Kylo Ren is dead,” his eyes were cold, as he slowly removed a shiny leather glove “then the house is mine.”

* * *

_ “My husband is not dead. He is missing.” _

Rey had to force herself to stop pacing the library. The action looked as if she were too quickly angered by the news. 

How would one normally process this shock?

Of course even a woman whose husband was missing under  _ normal _ circumstances would react to this visitor’s news with distress. She still had to find a balance of her seen reality and seen reaction.

“But presumed dead.”

Rey looked over the figure lounging in her husband’s chair. Smug as anything. Already comfortable. 

Ready to have her thrown from this house at a moment’s notice.

“My husband never mentioned the business of who the house would go to. And he's never mentioned you.”

She hoped her tone was neutral, as if to mask understandable surprise.

Hux grinned and folded his hands. 

“I am so distant he might not have even known the house would go to me should something happen to him. His side of the family liked to forget about me.”

Rey sniffed the truth in that statement. Somewhere in the cellar, her husband still lounged in his prison like this man did in his seat, completely unaware. 

“There is no proof he is deceased.”

“And none that he still lives.”

Rey had it. But it would damn her forever.

Hux looked over at her and half-laughed, a taunting smile on his face.

“Should he not turn up, and be announced dead by the authorities, I do, to a certain extent, contain a capacity for charity…”

* * *

  
  


She came down that night in her finest black dress to taunt him.

At least, at first. 

But he would not budge in his civility. When she dropped the fur stole from her shoulders, to reveal the silk straps over her shoulders, he greeted her warmly. When she drew near, he was eager. 

Hux and the servants and perhaps everyone else in the world was asleep. This was just between Rey and her husband.

Her thigh slid through the bars and her bare leg presented itself to him. 

“Why Rey,” he bowed to his knee and placed a kiss just above hers, “how you spoil me.”

“You  _ don’t  _ deserve it,” she hissed, twisting the pearls she shouldn’t have bothered to put on tonight in her fingers. 

He kept his lips hot on her skin. They drew up, reuniting with a place they knew well.

Rey pretended it made no difference to her as he lifted the black silk over her hips and kissed her bare cunt. His mouth was soft and patient. It was not desperation, or begging, that had his tongue slide between her lips and worry them open. It was her power, but he gave her that power freely. 

Rey gripped a bar of the cage and lifted one foot to a crossbar a few inches above the floor. Opening herself up. Her other hand slithered into his hair. 

A chill ran down her spine as he licked and sucked at all the good things he had shown her about her body. This was perverse, she shouldn’t miss this the same way she missed his smile and his kindness. But a wistfulness came over her for the past that she couldn’t explain as she shuddered and came, clutching the bars as if she were the one trapped inside. 

He cupped the back of her knee and smiled up at her as he drew back from her spent body. But the smile waned when he saw her face.

“Something troubles you. More than my crimes. More than your parents.”

An ache settled inside her at the implication that her parents were a mere  _ trouble. _ But as one who had already lost her entire life: she found herself more than desperate to keep this one here than to return to life before him.

What a horrible thing to feel.

She tried to ignore his prompting, but it spilled out:

“Your plan ignored a single detail. A cousin. A male cousin. Should Kylo Ren cease to exist, this is his house. Not mine. And he will displace me.”

Kylo’s face went white. A part of her wondered if he left this fact dangle so that she would have to free him. But his shock is clear, streaking his face in horror much like she felt when she finally stepped from the bathroom of the hotel in Paris...

“No,” he shook his head, clinging to the bars. “No, no, Rey, Rey we mustn’t play games now. Let me out.”

She stepped back with a sob. She hadn’t heard his tone waver from perfect calm for a single moment he was caged.  _ Now  _ it was real to him.  _ Now  _ he wanted to escape. 

Then this was really happening: and she must do what was right.

“I can’t. It’s for me to decide when you deserve it. Perhaps you should also feel what it is to lose what you love.”

Rey took a deep gulp of air as he rattled the bars and shouted for her to let him go. Then she turned on him and retreated up the stairs. 

“Not you, Rey,” he proved he truly couldn’t escape if he wanted to, which had been her suspicion the first few weeks, “not you. Not you. Not you.”

He truly couldn’t get out unless she let him.

She couldn’t. Not until it was like he said. Not until he earned it.

* * *

She made herself scarce in the house as long as she could. 

Kylo Ren could still be alive, if only in the legal sense, so her answer was hanging with a trembling  _ if  _ in the beginning of the sentence. 

Her routine changed, growing more self-conscious. She kept herself out of sight, in the tower that overlooked the stars in the evenings and in the forest and gardens by day. 

Hux had overtaken the study. Thus the piano was in  _ his _ new territory. The viper had infested her husband’s desk with his nest. 

He found her one afternoon, reading on the stairs of the tower where she had been given her first kiss, annoyance plain on his face. 

“I’ve been looking for you.”

She glanced up, trying to train the contempt from her face.

She could not lose this house to him. Not before she knew in her heart what was right for her to do about the man she had trapped in the basement. 

“I like solitude,” she said, turning a page, hoping her firmness would grant her what she liked.

Hux knelt at the step above her. She would have to pivot to face him: but she did not. He leaned down to make her feel small. 

She turned her head from him, but would not do so.

“When you’re not where you should be, with everyone else, I have to keep track of too many places at once. Don’t make it hard for me to keep an eye on you. Or you’ll vanish quite like your husband did.”

A shiver racked down her spine, but Rey turned her eyes back to her book as if he hadn’t said anything at all.

Hux snatched up her book and dropped it down the stairwell. 

It landed with a thud, as all things that fall from such a height do.

* * *

  
  


Rey found herself a bride again.

This was not the hasty preparation of her first wedding. It only felt faster, as she was floating, numb, from the moment that Scotland Yard declared Kylo Ren missing but likely dead and the newspapers did the final honor of announcing it so. 

It felt like madness to go on with such a terrible secret: so she became like all people who carry such secrets. Entirely forgetful of them. Moving through her day like an automaton. Picking trims and appetizers for a wedding that she would hardly participate in as a conscious being. 

Hux did not come to her door like Kylo would have. He kept close watch on her other ways.

Mrs. Timker hovered over her like a black cloud. It was maddening. Rey was about as free as Kylo was, and she hadn’t even murdered anyone. 

It turns out, the new master of the house had a deep grudge against the previous one. He glittered with jealousy for a dead man. It seemed to be the parasitic mindset that brought him to their door even before Kylo Ren was officially dead, that he took the man’s house, land, and wife in one fell swoop.

So he was much more precious about Rey than she had expected.

Rey did not know what else to do and moved like a zombie through each day, every day too late. 

It wasn’t safe to draw attention to Kylo. She never went near the cellar. She didn’t confer with the maid for the status of her prisoner. She sampled slices of dry cake and could not speak but for a slight nod or two and sat at her piano bench and didn’t so much as touch a key. 

She became something else entirely, floating through the house, haunting it, with his legacy and his name. 

About to make some cruel transfer so that nothing was his anymore.

* * *

  
  


On the eve of her first wedding: Rey had lost her innocence to her beloved.

On the eve of her second, she went to the cellar of his house to say goodbye to him.

_ Now _ he looked trapped. Truly trapped. His face was shadowed and swollen with an internal agony that made it hard for her to look directly at. Her whole body shivered as his hands tightened on the bars. 

“The maid tells me it’s tomorrow.”

Rey struggled with it. Facing this decision, made somewhat helplessly, but still made for reasons only she could understand. 

He was hers. His fate was hers. And if she did not feel he had atoned, she could not let him out. 

She had broken his heart, and in breaking it, he finally knew loss as she did.

Rey slipped herself like a sylph between the bars. She held out to him a music box in a hand that would not tremble now. 

“I had it made special for you.”

He looked at her like he longed to hold her, but couldn’t, even though no bars separated them anymore.

He gulped and took it and wound the key.

A piece from La Sylphide. The same that she had played on the piano as he touched her.

His eyes closed.

“Congratulations.”

He said it like a dog obeying an order. A lump rose in Rey’s throat.

_ You took this happiness from me. My parents, my family, my love of you. _

He did this.

She straightened her chin.

“I’m not here for congratulations.”

He sighed as she shed her robe. She was naked underneath. He looked over her with an expression she hadn't seen in a long time: a strict authority, a cultivator of art, the face he'd make as she played piano. Presenting him a piece.

“In Venice, there was a night where I had my bags delivered to the wrong room. Your room. So in the confusion, you would know that I slept next door, so close. Waiting for _you…”_

She had been twenty at the time. Before he asked for her hand from her father.

_“...thinking_ maybe you would come to me like this.”

She shook her head and swallowed.

“I was too innocent. And my parents answered the door and ordered our room be moved to another wing. I didn't know why at the time.”

He had been trying for her at every turn. They must have known there was nothing he wouldn't do. 

But what if she had just chosen him. If she had wanted to.

He nodded, remembering it too.

“I pulled the fire alarm that night, and as we all went outside to safety…”

Rey took his hand and drew it to her belly, where it spasmed down to the fingertips before flattening against her tight skin like he had been burned.

“You wore only a towel,” Rey swallowed and took a deep breath, closing her eyes to the feel of his skin, “and I couldn’t lift my eyes from your skin as all the residents of the hotel shivered on the street in the middle of the night, little virgin that I was, and when my father noticed he put his hand tight around my arm. The next day you remarked upon the bruise.”

“I did, and I knew then that I’d kill him.”

“And he slapped me, when we went back to the room,” she opened her eyes, “and I thought I didn’t know why. But I did. I knew what I wanted.”

If Kylo Ren had still been in the hotel room adjacent to hers, if they had not been moved, then he would have heard her cry out. 

Dark rage looked back at her.

“He is already dead,” she narrowed her eyes and furrowed her brow at him, “you cannot kill him a second time.”

He was  _ shaking. _

“Consider the man fortunate, then.”

His hand, emboldened by fury, seized against her stomach and then curled around her waist like a snake. She allowed it.

“I think I knew,” he said sadly, “by how you’d flinch at the piano when you made mistakes.”

Tears spilled out of her eyes.

“Tell me about the murders.”

He swallowed, his other hand joining its twin on the other side of her waist. Rey sliced through the space between them bare as the day she was born. Her front pressed to his clothed chest.

“They did not know who killed them. I wore a mask.”

She half-laughed. 

“You would.”

Thinking to himself, he turned his face away from hers.

“They did not suffer. If I knew all that you told me now, and all that I suspect you have left to tell me, they would have.”

Rey bit her lip and shook her head. It was not simply to have her. It was to have revenge for her.

This was too much to bear. In a way it was another reason it felt like she caused it. But it also felt like she could let go. That she was freed from the tremendous pain that a man’s desire for her had her parents wind up dead. It was his quarrel with them, not his want of her. 

He had said, many times, she faintly remembered, that this was her choice...

“Come. I'm going to be married tomorrow.”

His whole body was tense with fury, but she knelt at the floor of the cage. There was enough room for both of them to lie comfortably. At least, she could. If he bent some limbs, he could follow suit.

He fell in a prowling position over her body. Changed. Not reticent and pensive in his prison. For the first time she saw the face of the man capable of being a murderer. And he was hovered above her, staring into her eyes and pawing at her bare breasts. 

Because she let him.

“Just once more?” he whispered as he leaned himself down to kiss her. 

She nodded and opened her legs for him to lie between. He got himself comfortable as she squirmed, not realizing how needy she had been for his touch when all she could focus on was her anger for so long. She was already so wet and yielding. He noted this, eyes flickering to her face as if to confirm something, and she shivered by their dry, knowing look. Her breaths came in hot gasps as he petted her slick folds.

He pressed his lips to her neck.

“I thought I’d never have you again...yet somehow knowing it will be the last time is crueler.”

He held her steady as she shivered against him:

“Rey. You will never be lonely again. You carry two lives with you. Yours and mine.”

A gasping sob fell from her throat. She thrashed on the floor of the cage as he thrust in, reaching for the bars inches above her head for leverage as he began to drive in and out. 

“You’re right, Rey. You are my life. It is the one I gave to you. It is for you to decide what you do with it. Take it.”

“If I condemn you, I condemn myself.”

He nodded above her, pulling himself roughly against the bars with both hands to fuck her so well. He moved in her like thunder. Quakes from each riotous thrust travelled down her thighs. 

“Damn me, damn yourself. Damn us together.”

Rey’s legs pulled around his waist and she sobbed as she knew she loved him entirely. She could not give him up. 

But if she lost the house to Hux, she would lose him, and he would die here. 

If she let him go, what power did she have left over a murderer?

* * *

  
  


The morning of her wedding came and Rey felt further than life than she ever had before. 

The guests whispered about the pretty bride and how she was veiled in organza and tragedy. Two parents. A husband. 

Hux twitched impatiently the entire morning, like a buyer on the day of a great sale. That’s what this was. The final exchange of Kylo Ren’s property, entirely obtained. 

It all happened so suddenly that she did not realize how she got there at all. Moving as if drugged through the morning of the wedding.

Over the roar of the organ, she heard it so clearly it stopped her blood. 

_ I will always be with you. _

She had prayed there would be a way for her parents to tell her this, to reach out to her from beyond. But it wasn't their voices. 

It was his.

Rey froze at the end of the aisle, clutching her bridal bouquet, and gasped as if waking up. She looked over to Hux, who noted her faltering pace with a sneer, and declared it loud enough for the first few rows of seats:

“I cannot marry you.”

He practically spit out the word:  _ “What?” _

But Rey was spared explanation as Mrs. Timker appeared at the other end of the aisle Rey had just crossed over:

_ “This wedding cannot go on!” _

The blonde maid’s elbow was clutched in her hand, the girl cowering with a face so read it could burst into flame. 

Rey’s words were at once forgotten when the chapel rang with a cry:

_ “Kylo Ren still lives!” _

“Kylo,” she whispered to herself, knowing what she had decided for herself only moments ago would be true to the entire world. She felt glorious relief. “I have to go to him.”

Armitage Hux had looked like nothing could surprise him, the deck stacked in his favor, for so many weeks that his pale shock sent a thrill through Rey’s body.

“ _ What?” _

Rey laughed and hitched up the skirts of her gown so she could run. 

The mass of her in her wedding dress moved like a storm cloud. Shouts of surprise and horror rang through the church as the bride made herself vanish before all the guests.

She did not stop running until she was up the path from the chapel to the road leading up to the manor. She faintly heard the commotion of the confused crowd of wedding guests in close pursuit. But only she knew where she was going. Her flight led her to the cellar, with the key in her hand, sobbing with relief as she went to the bars of the cage and knelt at the cage-door.

_ “Rey.” _

A tired face looked up at her from where he was slumped on the floor. There was a music box playing as if wound for hours in his fist. She met his eyes. Exhausted but so happy. He looked like he hardly believed it. That she was here.

“You came back for me.”

Her hands shook terribly as she struggled with the key. She had to let him out. She was so desperate her teeth were chattering.

“Of course I did, darling,” she breathed, fitting her key into the lock.

The room began to fill, but all they could see was each other’s smiles.

_ “The maid revealed this horrific crime to me when I caught her smuggling food out of the kitchen on a silver platter. I thought she was stealing, but her duplicity was even worse than anything I had ever imagined—” _

Rey was entirely ignorant that the housekeeper was speaking, loud enough to fill the dank room, to the authorities she had brought to the house and the wedding party. Such perfect love glowed between Rey and her husband that it was impossible to notice anything else.

“—arrest this evil woman for holding this man hostage in his own home and for the crimes of bigamy—”

Kylo Ren stood from his cage and stepped out, freed, to greet the crowd of onlookers. Despite how thin he had become, he held himself proudly, strongly, and Rey herself swooned a little until he hooked an arm protectively around his wife’s waist. 

“What do you mean, arrest her?”

There was nothing but safety and protection now when he held her. It felt so good, so right. There was nothing he wouldn’t do for her. 

Rey peacefully rested her head on his chest. She had to be ready to let him go. Now she was, and with that came accepting that she was his. She did. Wholeheartedly. 

Timker looked pale as she turned back to the officers who had arrived there to issue the arrest. The was a titter of shock that rippled through the crowd: as the dead just spoke.

But he had little to offer that they expected from the shocking crime revealed.

“A man caged in the cellar is offensive enough for this woman to be locked in a madhouse.”

“What happens between myself and my wife under my own roof is a private matter, Mrs. Timker, and a waste of time for these good gentlemen. And I am now free: as I was never hostage. You cannot press these charges on my behalf for what was consented upon in our marriage. Now if you’ll excuse me. Hux, sorry old chap.”

Kylo had scooped up his bride in his arms and began to walk with her across the cellar floor. As Rey held herself in his arms, eagerly holding his shoulders, with his free hand he clapped the duped, jilted groom on the shoulder sympathetically. 

The crowd parted to allow him to cross the threshold of the door with Rey in his arms.

* * *

He contrived for her a sort of device. 

It was not always necessary. Time spanned in long moments where all that passed between them was sweet words and soft flesh. He could come to her whenever he wished, fold her over the piano bench, speak of the love for her he always had and she would be nothing if not receptive to her husband. Adoring him. 

But sometimes she knew he was bad. 

He had given her this device for when he was. 

Her husband whined and pleaded whenever she ensnared him. Not in the cellar, not again, not when his gift made it more convenient. Though he struggled, and could easily overpowered her if he truly wished for it, she could kick open his legs and place his cock in the contraption of little bars, fitted to the length of him, where only a key could let him out. 

Rey always held the key. 

And sometimes she left him like that for a long time. Kneeling at her feet and begging for it to be over, swollen and red and whimpering. Sometimes she lay him back in their bed and stroked her fingers along the exposed skin so he shivered and begged to be let out. Sometimes she made him cum with it on, so hard and with so much finality with it digging into his skin and spilling into empty air that he’d feel he’d never have her cunt ever again. 

Then when she decided he was good again, Rey would take out her key, and the lock would click open, and a different man would fall gratefully into her arms.

And they were happy like that.

The house was quiet at night now: as there was not a cage being constructed in the dead of night as there was during the weeks that Kylo Ren's precious visitor arrived. No covert and discrete builders tasked with a secret contract. Rey giggled wildly into his shoulder when he told her about the noises when they shared a bath together on night. She remarked upon her peaceful sleep, which she had assumed was just a shared bed, but certain aspects of his wickedness amused her so she could not help but howl with laughter when he told her.

She still locked him up for a little bit after he revealed such naughty things. He knew why he was being punished. He always knew.

It was up to her to decide these things. For he was hers. 

Had been for even longer than she was his.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kylo, @ the scene of the crime, to the cops and the witnesses: it’s my kink now gtfo. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for [Vi](https://twitter.com/ViWiWrites) and [Meg](https://twitter.com/redbelles) for looking this over for me in it's early stages. Based on [Mal's "What AU Is This?"](https://twitter.com/songspires/status/1290520701548392449?s=20) prompt from this August.
> 
> Because there’s usually an expectation that I perform some meta textual triple axel in terms of subverting problematic tropes: I do want to be clear this is darker than my usual fare, more homage to the form of the genre, and while it’s about navigating power dynamics it has one of those endings that’s like—Kylo’s a murderer, guys. Happy Halloween!


End file.
